No matter how many hours we spend in front of a screen, there will always be something that slips under the radar, and I must admit that is what happened to me with Squoosh. Its launch dates back to November 2018, and since then it has offered a quick and easy way to compress images in the browser. The best part? It supports multiple formats, and the image never ends up on any server: all the compression is done locally, on our own computer.
The ideal situation for any image is to preserve its original resolution without sacrificing quality or resorting to extreme compression methods, but when it comes to distributing or sharing that image with someone else, it does not make much sense to force the user to download several megabytes, destroying data plans in the process.
The good news is that we have a wide range of formats at our disposal to find the best size-to-quality ratio. Any basic image editor should suffice, but dedicated compressors also exist, and one of them is Squoosh. I had never heard of this web app before, and today I found out it comes from an experimental project by Google Chrome Labs.
Compressing Images with Squoosh
All you have to do is visit its official page and drag in the image to be processed. This automatically takes you to the interface, which uses a classic split layout: on the left you see the original unprocessed content, and on the right appears the compression board, where you can select the format and adjust advanced parameters. The slider helps you check quality differences, a before-and-after that works almost in real time, and reveals any artifacts or details associated with excessive compression.
There are nine formats available: AVIF, Browser JPG, Browser PNG, JPEG XL (beta), MozJPEG, OxiPNG, QOI, WebP, and WebP version 2, but Squoosh warns that it is unstable. Both AVIF and WebP do an excellent job compressing large images, however, MozJPEG is not far behind, and its secondary values are very interesting for extracting extra kilobytes from the final image. If that is not enough, Squoosh also allows you to reduce the original resolution and the color palette.
If you need even more control, Squoosh lets you reduce the resolution and the color palette of the original image. As you can see in the example above, a 4K image that originally exceeded eight megabytes ended up taking only 368 kilobytes on disk, without changing the resolution. (This version is 1440p.)
Two last details: the images never leave your computer when compressing (the only telemetry the site gets is the number of visitors and the before-and-after sizes), and it is open source. Its source code is available on GitHub.
Official site: Click here
