Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser
19 comments
·December 6, 2025Jaxan
I’ve been using the app ImageOptim for this use case (a stand-alone app, not something in the browser). Can recommend!
susam
+1 Whenever I create a favicon.png, I always run it through ImageOptim and I consistently get an optimised PNG that is about 30% to 40% smaller than the original.
vjshah
Squoosh appears to support more modern formats (webp/avif) than imageoptim, so it should produce much smaller files
qingcharles
Still no support for Google's own Jpegli:
seabass
I love squoosh! It’s been one of the few PWAs I have installed and actually use regularly.
Does anyone know if their optimization methods still best-in-class these days? It’s been good enough for all my practical needs, but I know it’s been around for a while and there may be better techniques for some file types now.
skylovescoffee
Piggybacking off this, I made a fork of Squoosh called Squoosh CLI which turns this into a CLI tool.
https://github.com/sbcinnovation/squoosh-cli
Windows support may be iffy, any PR's are welcome.
karim79
We made a SaaS (and I'm sure I'll get shit for this). We have avif/webP/heic and JXL is almost there:
lionkor
Is it successful? I always wondered who uses this and pays for it -- is it sustainable? How much work is it to upkeep, maintain, etc?
karim79
Depends on how you'd define success. It has been profitable since 2014. A few millions in revenue.
Upkeep is another story when you have thousands of customers using the API. It's not so easy to keep everyone happy, as image quality is highly subjective there's a quality tolerance spectrum which for the life of me I will never understand.
erenburakalic
+1 That’s cool. That already covers a lot
null
busymom0
Why does setting the quality to 100% make the resulting image size bigger than original? And if there's a reason, I think it should simply just return the original smaller image in those cases.
paverama
I'd like a CLI tool with the same features to batch-compress images.
Trung0246
Surprisingly this also remove synthID.
qingcharles
I just tested it with a PNG from Nano Banana, recompressed to JPG and even reduced palette to 256 colors. Gemini still says the image contains SynthID.
Trung0246
Interesting, maybe mine is a little bit too abstract.
ranger_danger
What is synthID?
I love Squoosh. I have used it since it launched.
However, IIRC, Squoosh was built largely by Surma and Jake; or maybe they were just the "face" of the project. Either way, at one point it even had a CLI.
Since their departure from Google, the CLI project was abandoned and it feels like the web app is as well.
As is usual Google things, I think it's a matter of time until some PM discovers squoosh.app, and asks "What's this?" and then the thing gets killed.
Perhaps this HN post will be the thing that does it.