Google has launched a new web app called Squoosh that is able to compress many different types of image files from the comfort of your web browser. Designed originally to display how fast Chrome can load web apps, Squoosh works in all the modern web browsers. When you load it for the very first time in your web browser, it notifies you that it is “Ready to work offline” which basically means that once loaded, it can be used offline in your web browser and it does not need to contact any web server to compress or optimize the images. The privacy section of the web app also informs that – “Image compression is handled locally; no additional data is sent to the server.”
In order to load your images in the Squoosh web app, you can drag-n-drop them on it or you can click on “Select an image” to browse and pick your images. You can select all the popular image file types including JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and SVG file types. If you just want to try Squoosh and see what it does, then you can select one of the example images given on the Squoosh website. Since this app was designed to display how fast Chrome works even when working with large images, you can load very large size image files without seeing any slowing down of the browser.
After loading the image, you are shown an “before and after” interface for the image – visually displaying you how the image is going to appear in your web browser after making changes. You can select the compression methods – OptiPNG, MozJPEG, WebP, Browser JPEG, Browser PNG and Browser WebP. Other options include the resizing the image and reducing the color palette.
In advanced settings, you can choose to reduce the quality of image, change color channels, transparency and more. The change in the file size of the image is displayed dynamically and you can download the edited image from the download button displayed in the lower-right corner.
You can use the Squoosh web app by visiting https://squoosh.app/.