Image Compressor

Why compression governance matters

Uncompressed or ad‑hoc compressed images hurt Core Web Vitals, email deliverability, and app startup times.The Image Compressor gives teams a single, client‑side surface to standardize formats(WebP / AVIF / PNG / JPEG), target bitrates, chroma subsampling, and metadata stripping — without shipping assets to third‑party services.

Performance Notebook

- Target budgets: hero < 200KB, inline < 60KB, thumbnails < 12KB.

• Formats: prefer AVIF for photographic content, WebP fallback, PNG for UI glyphs with alpha, SVG for vector when possible.
• Chroma subsampling: 4: 2: 0 for photos; keep 4: 4: 4 for crisp UI if JPEG is unavoidable.
• Resize first, then compress.Document source and target dimensions in the preset.

Advanced Topics

- Perceptual quality: calibrate using SSIM/PSNR references captured in FlowPanel notes.
	- Progressive JPEGs vs baseline: use progressive for email and legacy clients; measure paint time.

• Color profiles: normalize to sRGB; strip embedded ICC unless required.Log decisions per campaign.
• Metadata hygiene: remove EXIF by default to prevent location leaks; whitelist creator fields when governance requires provenance.

Reviewer Playbook

- Before / after diff: capture original size, format, dimensions, and compressed outputs across formats.

• Accessibility check: verify contrast and legibility after compression; test with Color Blindness Simulator when gradients shift.
• Breakpoint audit: export at multiple sizes; pair with srcset and sizes guidance in the preset description.

Onboarding Labs

- Exercise 1: Convert a 1200×800 JPEG hero to AVIF / WebP at 75 Q; compare CLS and LCP.

• Exercise 2: PNG UI icon to SVG; measure crispness and size wins.
• Exercise 3: Email header under 150KB; validate in major clients.

Metrics

- Track LCP and CLS shifts per preset slug.

• Monitor email total payload; correlate with open / clip rates.
• Log CDN cache hit rates post‑format change.

Final Thoughts

Codify compression rules per surface(marketing, product UI, email).The Compressor’s presets become evidence — reproducible, privacy‑safe, and reviewable — that keeps performance steady across teams.

Publishing without regressions

Before uploading hero assets, designers drag files into the Image Compressor, compare before/after sizes, and document the chosen format plus quality slider. They paste the stats (bytes saved, % reduction) into their CMS ticket. Engineering then references those numbers during performance reviews, proving that visuals respect the performance budget.

Multi-channel readiness

Marketing teams maintain presets for email, in-app notifications, and landing pages. Each preset captures dimensions, target kilobytes, and fallback formats like WebP or AVIF. Because the FlowPanel previews results across light and dark backgrounds, stakeholders approve assets immediately without waiting for staging builds.

Incident prevention

When performance alerts spike, SREs search for recently uploaded media. If they find an outlier, they pull the original asset, run it through the compressor with the standard preset, and hotfix the page. Documenting the new stats helps identify training gaps in the team that uploaded the bloated image.

Governance and brand

Brand managers worry that compression introduces artifacts. Encourage them to sit in on the compression session, comparing zoomed previews while toggling quality. Once they sign off on acceptable thresholds, bake those numbers into the preset and share a short Loom showing the decision. Future debates reference that artifact instead of subjective opinions.

Automation runway

DevEx engineers can script the same presets using Sharp or Squoosh CLI, but they rely on the UI to experiment. After presets stabilize, export their JSON equivalents and commit them to your asset pipeline repo. Deployment scripts can then fail builds if new images exceed the size budget, citing the exact preset as the standard.

Reporting

Create a dashboard that aggregates bytes saved per release from the compressor logs. Present that metric alongside Core Web Vitals in quarterly reviews. Quantifying impact keeps the tool top-of-mind whenever new campaigns launch under tight deadlines.