squoosh

Squoosh is a web app that compresses images directly in your browser. The problem it solves is that image files are often much larger than they need to be, which slows down websites and wastes storage. Squoosh lets you take a photo or graphic, experiment with different compression formats and quality settings, see a before-and-after comparison, and download the smaller result.

Crucially, all compression happens locally on your device — your image is never sent to a server, which protects your privacy. The app supports multiple image formats, which are different methods of encoding image data, each with their own trade-offs between file size and visual quality. Squoosh uses best-in-class codecs (the technical term for compression algorithms) to achieve good results.

You would use Squoosh when you have images that are too large for a website, an email attachment, or a social media post and want to shrink them without installing any software. It is especially useful for developers and designers who want to quickly check how much a specific codec can reduce a particular image. The project is built with TypeScript and is open source under the Google Chrome Labs organization.