Is TinyPNG Still the Default? Squoosh and MyTools Compared

For about a decade, "compress an image online" has had one obvious answer: TinyPNG. It's still very good. But it uploads your files, caps you at twenty images, and refuses anything over 5 MB — and if you're reading this, you probably hit one of those. This is a TinyPNG vs Squoosh comparison with a third option in the mix, MyTools, and the point isn't to crown a winner. The three are built on genuinely different assumptions, and picking the wrong one is how you end up compressing thirty photos one at a time at eleven at night.

What "Compressing an Image" Actually Means

Two different operations hide under the word "compress", and tools rarely say which one they're doing.

The first is re-encoding: writing the pixels back out at a lower quality setting, usually as JPEG or WebP. Detail is thrown away permanently, but a 4 MB camera JPEG typically lands around 300–500 KB with no difference you'd notice at screen size.

The second is palette reduction, which is what makes PNGs small. A PNG is lossless by design, so the only way to shrink one meaningfully is to store fewer distinct colours. Do it well and a screenshot drops 60–70% and looks identical. Just re-save the PNG through a browser canvas instead, and the file barely moves — or gets bigger.

The reasons people go looking are specific, and they push toward different tools:

• An upload form with a hard cap. School portals and visa applications routinely stop at 1 MB per image and don't explain the rejection.
• A performance audit. Lighthouse flags the hero image, the designer's export is a 2400 px PNG.
• An email that bounced. Twenty-three full-resolution photos is 80 MB, and Gmail stops at 25.

The first case is one image, the second a folder, the third a batch you need done in ten minutes. That difference matters more than any quality benchmark.

TinyPNG: The Smart Default

TinyPNG (from Voormedia, sold commercially as Tinify) is the tool everyone eventually bookmarks. You drag files onto the panda, it uploads them, compresses server-side, and hands back a download. There are no settings at all — which is the entire product philosophy.

What it gets right

• PNG compression is genuinely better than the alternatives here. TinyPNG's selective quantization reduces a PNG's colour count intelligently rather than just re-saving it. For screenshots, logos, and flat-colour graphics, it beats what a browser canvas re-encode can do, and the alpha channel survives.
• Zero decisions. No quality slider, no format dropdown, no presets. You get one sensible result. For most people that's the feature, not the limitation.
• A real ecosystem behind it. WordPress plugin, Photoshop plugin, and a documented API with 500 free compressions a month. If compression is part of a pipeline rather than a one-off, that matters.

Where it falls short

• The free web tool is fenced. Twenty images per batch, 5 MB maximum per file. Reports differ on whether the twenty is per batch or a monthly allowance, but either way a phone photo set hits the size cap first — modern camera JPEGs routinely exceed 5 MB. Lifting the limits means a Web Pro subscription.
• Your files are uploaded. Compression happens on Tinify's servers. They delete inputs after a retention window and are upfront about it, but an uploaded copy of a passport scan is still an uploaded copy.
• No control when you need it. There's no way to say "go harder" or "cap this at 1600 px". You get TinyPNG's opinion, and if it isn't small enough your only move is to run the output through again.

Squoosh: The Codec Laboratory

Squoosh is Google Chrome Labs' in-browser compressor, and it's less a utility than an instrument. Everything runs locally through WebAssembly builds of the actual encoders — MozJPEG, OxiPNG, WebP, AVIF — with every parameter exposed.

What it gets right

• You can see the trade-off before you commit. A draggable divider splits the canvas between original and compressed, updating live as you move the quality slider, with the projected file size in the corner. When you're deciding whether quality 60 is acceptable for a particular photo, nothing else answers that honestly.
• The encoders are the good ones. MozJPEG and OxiPNG produce measurably smaller files at equal quality than the browser's built-in canvas encoder, and AVIF is smaller again where you can use it.
• It's a PWA. Install it once and it works with the network off — handy on a plane or a locked-down machine.

Where it falls short

• It is resolutely one image at a time. No queue, no multi-select, no ZIP. Thirty product photos means thirty rounds of drag, tune, download. The batch request is one of the oldest open issues on the repo.
• The knobs assume you know what they do. "Effort", "quantizer quality", "subsampling" — great for a hero image you'll ship to a million people, unhelpful when you just need the school portal to accept your photo.
• Maintenance has been quiet for years. The web app still works, but it's effectively frozen and the companion CLI was retired. It's a tool to use, not one to expect changes from.

MyTools: Built for the Batch

The MyTools image compressor sits deliberately between the two. Like Squoosh it runs entirely in your browser — files are decoded and re-encoded in a web worker on your own machine, nothing is uploaded. Like TinyPNG it's built around dropping in a pile of files and getting them all back at once.

What it gets right

• Batch is the default, not an upgrade. Drop in the whole folder, pick a compression level once, download the results individually or as one ZIP. No image count limit and no per-file size cap, because there's no server rationing anything — the ceiling is your device's memory.
• Enough control to be useful, not enough to be confusing. Four choices: Light, Balanced, Strong, or a custom quality from 1 to 100. You can also cap the longest edge (1920 px is a sensible web default), convert the output to JPEG, WebP, or PNG on the way through, and strip EXIF — on by default, so your photos' GPS coordinates don't travel with them.
• Nothing is uploaded, and there's no account. Squoosh's privacy property applied to a batch workflow. Useful when the files are ID scans, medical images, or client work under NDA.

Where it falls short

• PNG compression is the weak spot. MyTools re-encodes through the browser's canvas, which has no equivalent of TinyPNG's colour quantization or OxiPNG. On a flat-colour PNG the result is often no smaller than the original — the tool detects that and quietly hands back your untouched file rather than a worse one, but "no change" isn't the outcome you wanted. For PNG-heavy work, TinyPNG wins outright.
• No before/after preview. You see thumbnails and original sizes, then the compressed totals afterwards. There's no slider to check what quality 50 does to one photo's skin tones before you run all forty.
• Animated GIFs come out as still images. Browsers can't encode GIF from a canvas, so an animated GIF is flattened to a single-frame JPEG. A real trap if you drop in a folder without checking what's in it.
• No target-size mode. You choose a quality level, not "get this under 1 MB". If the portal wants a specific size, you pick Strong and check the result.

At a Glance

	TinyPNG	Squoosh	MyTools
Batch	Up to 20 files	One at a time	Unlimited
File size cap (free)	5 MB	Device memory	Device memory
Files uploaded?	Yes, server-side	No	No
Signup	Not for the free tier	None	None
Quality control	None — one result	Every encoder parameter	4 levels + custom 1–100
Best at	PNGs and flat graphics	One image, tuned perfectly	A folder of photos, fast

TinyPNG vs Squoosh vs MyTools: Which Should You Pick?

Pick TinyPNG if your files are PNGs — screenshots, UI exports, logos, anything with large areas of flat colour or transparency. Its quantization is the best of the three. Just check your files are under 5 MB first.

Pick Squoosh when you have one image that matters a lot and you want to see exactly what compression does to it: a hero image, an app store screenshot, a photo where one piece of detail has to survive. The comparison slider is worth the single-file workflow for that job.

Pick MyTools when the unit of work is a folder rather than a file, or when the images shouldn't leave your machine. Thirty-eight photos for a school portal, a batch of scans — that's where TinyPNG's twenty-file cap and Squoosh's one-at-a-time flow both become the bottleneck.

One caveat: if your photos came off an iPhone as HEIC, none of the three will open them directly. Run them through the image-to-JPG converter first, then compress.

The Bottom Line

TinyPNG is still the right default for PNGs and still the most frictionless single-purpose tool on the web — it just charges for scale, in subscriptions or in uploads. Squoosh is the best instrument for tuning one image and seeing the damage before you accept it. MyTools is the one that doesn't count your files or ask for them, which is what you want when the job is a folder and a deadline.

If that's the job in front of you, open the image compressor and drop the whole folder in →