It’s been a while since I found a tool to get excited about, hence the lack f Top Tool Tuesdays. But, I’m looking at this thing called Squoosh. And look, I’m not a tech guy. I’m a guy who has spent a significant portion of his life staring at a screen, waiting for a photo of a dog to load so I can feel something, anything. And the internet, man, it’s just gotten heavy. It’s bloated. It’s like the digital equivalent of my attic space: full of crap nobody needs and it’s slowing everything down.
You’re a creative, right? You make things. You take a photo that’s twelve megabytes because you want to capture the soul of the thing, the texture of the light. Then you try to put it on a website and it’s like trying to shove a couch through a doggy door. It doesn’t work. So you open some other tool, you upload your art to a server in god-knows-where, you wait, you pray, and you download a version of your work that looks like it was faxed from 1997.
That’s the anxiety loop. That’s the panic. You’re compromising your vision just to make the machine work.
Squoosh.app, which is a Google thing, by the way, takes all of that and just… puts it in the browser . No uploading your client’s unannounced product shots to some server you don’t control. No signing up for another account with a password you’ll forget. You drag the file in, and it happens right there on your machine . The privacy alone is enough to make a neurotic like me breathe a little easier.
But here’s the part that actually gets me excited, and I don’t get excited about software. It shows you the damage. There’s a slider. You move it, and it splits the screen, original on one side, the compressed version on the other . You can see what you’re losing. Or, more importantly, you can see what you’re not losing. You can crank the quality down, watch the file size plummet, and realize that nobody on a phone screen is ever going to know the difference between a three-megabyte JPEG and a ninety-kilobyte AVIF .
For a creative, this is control. This is the difference between guessing and knowing. You can experiment with the new formats, WebP, AVIF, without having to be an engineer . You can take a screenshot with tiny text, switch it to OxiPNG, and make sure it’s still legible before you ship it .
It’s a small thing. It’s a free thing in a browser tab. But it gives you back a little bit of sanity. It lets you put your work out into the world without making the world wait for it. And in this day and age, that’s not nothing. That’s a little slice of peace.
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