Today I discovered a sweet new cli for compressing images. squoosh cli is a wasm powered cli that supports a bunch of formats that I would want to convert my website images to.

Web App

First the main feature of squoosh is a web app that makes your images smaller right in the browser, using the same wasm. It's sweet! There is a really cool swiper to compare the output image with the original, and graphical dials to change your settings.

CLI

What is even cooler is that once you have settings you are happy with and are really cutting down those kb's on your images, there is a copy cli command button! If you have npx (which you should if you have nodejs and npm) already installed it just works without installing anything more.

Converting all of my png's to webp

I copied the command that it gave me for converting to webp, and set it up to run on all of my pngs.

npx @squoosh/cli --webp \
  '{"quality":75 \
    "target_size":0 \
    "target_PSNR":0 \
    "method":4 \
    "sns_strength":50 \
    "filter_strength":60 \
    "filter_sharpness":0 \
    "filter_type":1 \
    "partitions":0 \
    "segments":4 \
    "pass":1 \
    "show_compressed":0 \
    "preprocessing":0 \
    "autofilter":0 \
    "partition_limit":0 \
    "alpha_compression":1 \
    "alpha_filtering":1 \
    "alpha_quality":100 \
    "lossless":0 \
    "exact":0 \
    "image_hint":0 \
    "emulate_jpeg_size":0 \
    "thread_level":0 \
    "low_memory":0 \
    "near_lossless":100 \
    "use_delta_palette":0 \
    "use_sharp_yuv":0 \
    }' \
    static/*.png -d squoosh-webp

I opened my images repo and converted all pngs to webp using the command above. I got 94% compression on my existing pngs without resizing anything. This is dang impressive, and not too hard to do. I do want to refactor my images site at some point and include this as part of the ci system.

I also converted to avif, but it sent all my cpus to 100 for quite awhile, for only another 2MB total. Not sure if its worth it or not.