If you are a web designer, or a blogger like us, you must be dealing with lots of images daily. And, you must already be aware that keeping the web pages fast and optimized can sometimes turn out to be a herculean task if you have large sized images at hand. Of course, you can always resort to compression to reduce the size, but in doing so, you are loosing image quality. Add to that a plethora of image formats for web that could drive you crazy. Well, to save you some of that frustration, Google’s Chrome Labs has launched a new image optimization tool called Squoosh.
We know, there already are tons of image optimization tools available in the market right now, but, what’s worth noting here is that Squoosh is free and open source. You can view its source code on GitHub. Furthermore, Squoosh is browser-based which means it needs no downloading and installation – just head over to squoosh.app in your web browser (works best with Chrome) and you are good to go.
That’s not it. What’s cool about Squoosh is that you can use it offline too inside the web browser. However, you do need to open it in the browser once with an active Internet connection. Having said that, as Squoosh is a browser-based tool, you can use it on both desktop as well as your smartphone.
Squoosh supports a total of six formats – OptiPNG, MozJPEG, WebP, Browser PNG, Browser JPEG, and Browser WebP. And, in addition to compressing an image to reduce its file size, Squoosh also lets you edit images to a certain extent.
So, what are your thoughts about this open source, browser-based image optimization tool from Google?
