How to compress images with Google Squoosh
Image compression is a tricky thing. When you compress an image, you want the quality to remain more or less the same but the size to be reduced. In most cases, an image is compressed to save space however a reduced size almost always means a reduction in quality. There are loads of different services and apps that you can use to compress images and Google has one in the mix too. It’s called Squoosh and it’s fairly good.
Compress images with Squoosh
Squoosh works in your browser and can also run offline. The app is an experimental one and it supports OptiPNG, MozJPEG, WebP, Browser PNG, Browser JPEG, and Browser WebP. You can use it in any modern web browser.
Visit Squoosh and add the image you want to compress. Once you add the image, you have to select which format it is you want to convert it to after compression.
You should know that both JPEG and WebP are lossy formats. Each format has its own compression settings that you can customize.
When you add an image, the app displays it across two panes. The left pane shows you the original image, and the right one shows you the image after the compression has been applied. You can click and drag the image to view other parts of it, post compression. To select the compression format, open the menu at the bottom left and under the Compress section open the dropdown. In addition to converting and compressing an image, you can also resize it and reduce its color palette. Reducing the color palette will obviously result in a less sharp image.
The control box at the bottom left will show you how much the file size has been reduced. To download the compressed image, click the download button at the bottom of the control box on the right.
With the brief tests we did, the compression isn’t bad at all. In fact, there was no noticeable drop in quality for the photos that we tested with. It is possible that for images that feature more drastic changes in lighting e.g., a photo of a sunset against a city skyline, there will be more dark areas after compression. For indoor photos, the results were fairly good.
Compression is always going to result in loss of quality however, developers have been striving to limit how much quality is lost when an image is compressed and compared to a few years ago, there’s been reasonable progress.
