InkSaver is a tool designed to help you save ink when printing documents. It converts images to grayscale to reduce the black ink usage.

This side project motivation came from the price of ink cartridges induced by printing (lots) of drawings for my kids 🧒👧

This app is written in .net 9 and published to .exe using AOT compilation, self contained mode, and trimming unused code to ensure faster startup time and smaller memory footprints. It uses SixLabors.ImageSharp to transform images to grayscale. The result is a 6~7Mb .exe file, ready to use.

1. Download the latest release from the releases page
2. drag & drop an image file on the .exe

It will launch the system print window with the image converted to grayscale.

You can also use it in CLI mode by running the executable with the image file as an argument:

ink-saver.exe path/to/image.png

you can add the '-y' argument to skip the confirmation dialog and exit the program directly after printing :

ink-saver.exe path/to/image.png -y

original image: printed image :