Squoosh, the New Google App for Optimizing Images

Have you ever had to send a photo via email and it wouldn’t let you because of the size? Did you have to resort to a cloud storage service or even a desktop application to compress those images? Well, we are in luck! Google, the internet giant, has given us some great news today: it has launched the new squoosh.app. A website that allows us to convert, compress, and optimize images with a lot of customization.

Why is Image Size So Important?

The vast majority of us carry a smartphone in our pocket that, among many other things, is capable of taking photos. Some of them even have two cameras (even reaching the five rear cameras of the future Nokia 9) that help with light, focus, or optical zoom. All this means that the final size of the photo keeps increasing, and this, combined with the huge number of photos we take each day, can mean we run out of internal memory on our devices quickly.
Of course, one solution is to buy a phone with larger storage. Or buy a microSD card to expand memory. However, these solutions are the typical bread for today, hunger for tomorrow since sooner or later, we’ll run out of capacity, and that day, believe me, will come.
On the other hand, if you're a web developer or have ever worked on a website, you know that an image that’s too large slows down the loading of page resources. This worsens our accessibility and can even negatively impact our SEO strategy. But of course, a low-quality or pixelated image also worsens the final result, giving the impression of poor content.
So, we have to resort to other solutions such as using a more optimal file format or compressing the images further to take up less space.

JPEG vs Other Image Formats

It’s rare to find someone who hasn’t heard of the famous JPEG or JPG image format. Technically, it’s not a file format but rather a compression method that allows us to save a lot of space depending on the level of compression chosen. This compression is lossy, meaning we’re losing some information in a way, although often it’s imperceptible for normal use.
There are many other file formats that help with this task depending on our needs. From HEIC, the format Apple invented to reduce its images from iOS 11, to WebP, the format Google invented that provides superior compression for the web, both lossy and lossless.

Great, But How Do We Manage All This?

Compressing or converting images was a tedious task until today, when we can start using Squoosh: a website developed by Google. While we’ll see the utility it offers with an example, I’ll give you a hint that it can even be used offline. For that, we’ll need to load the website with internet the first time, and from that point on, it will be available offline.

As we can see, we can start using it as soon as the page loads, without needing to register or any other clicks. We can upload our image or choose one of the four examples provided. The first thing that catches the eye is the separator in the middle of the screen. With it, we can review each part of the photo and compare both sides in real-time. In our case, we’ve chosen to place the original image on the left and will configure the different parameters on the right.

The first option is the output format, which can be chosen from: Original image, OptiPNG, MozJPEG, WebP, browser PNG, browser JPEG, or browser WebP. Depending on this, more options are displayed, including resizing, reducing the color palette, enabling or disabling loss, effort or compression level, quality, transparency, and more advanced parameters that we will analyze in-depth later in another post.

Next, I leave you with a comparison table of the final size, where the recommended parameters from the utility itself were used, and the image dimensions were reduced to 1000 pixels in width. Be careful! The image compression process runs through our browser and therefore through our device, which will need more or less time depending on the parameters or the specifications of that device.



Notice how the PNG format produces a larger file size than the original. For OptiPNG, we had to adjust the compression effort parameter to 1 due to the high resource consumption and the compression process taking more than 5 minutes (wow!).

It’s up to us to choose the optimal parameters, check the result, and download the final file in the desired format. Who knows, maybe it will end up in our bookmarks. I encourage you to try it out and, as they say, see it for yourself.