Fun Web Tool Lets You Mess With Image Compression
One of my favorite internet videos is a clip from "King of the Hill" where Hank Hill is yelling at a copy store employee, incredulous that he should know what a "jay peg is" as the video is compressed into oblivion. It's both hilarious and instructive as to how various levels of digital compression affect the audio and image quality — a winning combination!
Out today is yet another fun and educational demonstration of digital image compression, this time from the folks at the Google Chrome Labs. It's called, appropriately, Squoosh.
How does it work? Well, as you might expect, you go to the website and upload an image of yours. Any image will do, but for maximum education, we recommend something hi-res, with a large file size.1
Here, I've decided to upload a photo of my lunch: an egg scramble with butternut squash, sweet potato, grape tomatoes, perched on top of a bed of kale. Delicious!
Uploading an image into Squoosh presents you with a veritable feast of image compression levels and algorithms, color palettes and profiles, and you can see all the changes in real time by moving the slider back and forth over the image — noticing the quality loss between the original and the compressed version.
Granted, uploading an image of this to our CMS does indeed apply another level of image compression to this image, but still, here, at half quality, you can barely tell the difference between the two images even when zoomed in 100% — and the file size is down from 2.4MB to a mere 507kB. Isn't image compression wild?
In order to discern any sort of noticeable difference between the compressed version and the original, I had to crank the quality down to 25. And even then, it's not that bad — all for another 200kB savings in file size.
With how cheap storage is and how fast internet is today, image compression is, arguably, not as crucial to the web as it once was. Sure, if you have a lot of images on your website (say like Digg.com!), you don't want to force your visitors to download 60MB of images just for stopping by. But most of us are more than happy to send over multiple-megabyte images to friends and family with our phones with limited data plans. Of course, this hasn't stopped engineers from improving lossy compression algorithms. Last year, Google engineers managed to further reduce JPEG file size by 35% without sacrificing quality.
Speaking of, you might be wondering what would happen if you cranked the quality down to zero. Well, friend, you can definitely do that. And it looks awesome.
