The Best Image Compressor for Mac in 2026

Smol wins this list on coverage rather than on encoder heroics. It writes JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and GIF; it takes a folder instead of a file; and its defaults strip metadata. We checked that last one against the Sony camera file: every EXIF field was gone from Smol’s output and all of them survived sips’.

On rate-distortion it is good, not miraculous. Against Apple’s encoder it tied on three of four test files and won by 9.8% on the already-compressed camera photo, then by around 20% on larger photographic crops at matched SSIM. The real jump comes from format: the same screenshot went from 716,970 bytes as JPEG to 241,943 as AVIF at a higher SSIM, which is a 66% cut that no encoder tuning gets you.

One control nothing else here offers: a file-size target. We asked for an AVIF under 100 KB from a 352,861-byte JPEG and got 51,140 bytes, inside the requested band, reported as such. Two caveats worth knowing. The target is a band, not a ceiling, and the lower bound defaults to 40% of your maximum, so on an easy image you can get a file larger than necessary. And it is slow: 59.9 s for that single image on a cold engine, against 1.4 s per file for ordinary compression.

Honest limits: macOS only, no Windows or Linux build. No lossless mode, so if you need pixel-identical output use ImageOptim. No JPEG XL and no SVG. It reads RAW and HEIC happily, but the formats it writes are the list above and nothing else. Smol is $29 once for one Mac, $49 for a team pack, updates included, no subscription. The same window also handles PDFs, video and audio, which is the actual reason people stop keeping four utilities around; the document side is measured separately in our PDF compressor roundup.

ImageOptim is a GUI over the best open-source optimizers: it ships oxipng, zopflipng, pngout, advpng, pngquant, gifsicle, jpegoptim, guetzli, svgcleaner and a mozjpeg build of jpegtran. Drop files in, get the same pixels in fewer bytes. We verified the lossless claim rather than repeating it, and it holds: absolute error of zero on every one of our six outputs, including the JPEG.

Where it beats everything else on this page is flat graphics. Our transparent badge went from 101,316 to 45,626 bytes, a 55% cut, with nothing lost. If you ship UI assets, diagrams or logos, this is the tool and it costs nothing.

It is also the tool with the strangest release situation in this category. The shipped build is 1.9.3, and its own Sparkle feed dates it to 29 October 2023. The repository is not dormant: the most recent commit to main landed 13 July 2026. That commit is PR #466, which stops ImageOptim pinning its worker processes to Apple Silicon efficiency cores, and it has never shipped in a release. We confirmed the underlying behavior on our own machine. The bundled defaults.plist sets RunLowPriority to true, and sampling ps -axo pid,nice,args during a run showed every optimizer at nice 10.

The advertised workaround is defaults write net.pornel.ImageOptim RunLowPriority -bool false. On 1.9.3 it changes nothing measurable, because the shipped build still lowers priority unconditionally: the helpers stayed at nice 10with the preference off, and three timed trials came out at 5.23 s median with it on versus 5.52 s with it off. The honest read is that the fix exists in source and you cannot have it yet. Speed is the practical cost: our six-file batch took 99.26 s. Its bundled oxipng is 9.0.0 against an upstream v10.2.1 released 2 September 2026. More on the trade-offs in our ImageOptim alternatives page.

For a single image, File → Export in Preview with the quality slider is a perfectly good answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For anything repeatable, sips is the underrated one: sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 60 in.png --out out.jpg works in any script, on any Mac, with nothing installed. On the Kodak set it matched our encoder at equal SSIM.

On macOS 27 it also writes AVIF, which almost nobody knows. sips -s format avif -s formatOptions 75 produced a valid 46,967-byte AVIF from kodim07, competitive with anything here. Run sips --formats and read the Writable column yourself.

Three sharp edges. First, WebP is listed as readable but not writable, and asking for it fails silently: sips -s format webp prints the file paths, exits 0, and writes no file at all. Second, the quality scale is its own thing. The named presets are exact aliases we confirmed byte for byte, low = 25, normal = 50, high = 75, best = 100, and best switches to 4:4:4 chroma, which made our test file three times larger than formatOptions 95. Third, it keeps your EXIF. Camera model, timestamp and GPS all survived in our output, which matters if you are about to upload holiday photos.

The thing it does not do is a folder. You write the loop yourself, and there is no progress, no summary, and no protection against clobbering an original.

Nothing else here lets you drag a divider across the image and watch the artifacts appear in real time, with two different codecs either side and a live byte count. When you are deciding whether a hero image can survive AVIF at quality 45, Squoosh answers the question in ten seconds and every desktop app on this list answers it in export-and-check cycles. It runs entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded, and it works on any machine you can open a browser on.

The maintenance picture needs stating precisely rather than dramatically. The last commit to the default branch was 19 August 2024. In issue #1472, opened 18 May 2026 and titled “Abandoned?”, Jake Archibald replied the same day: “The problem is the folks who built it left Google, and Google refused to hand the project over, or maintain it. That said, I still have commit & publish access, so I was planning on updating the JPEG XL and AVIF codecs some point soon.” As of today the site is up and works.

The command-line build is a different story, and it is the reason Squoosh cannot be your batch tool. @squoosh/cli was last published on 3 January 2023 and declares support for Node 12, 14 and 16 only. We installed it on Node v26.7.0 and it threw before encoding anything: TypeError: Cannot set property navigator of #<Object> which has only a getter. So the web app has no batch mode and the batch tool does not run. Alternatives are laid out in our Squoosh alternatives comparison.

TinyPNG earned its reputation on PNG quantization, and the free web tool remains the fastest way to make an image smaller on a computer that is not yours. Drop files on the page, download the results. Its current limits, from its own page, are up to 20 images at a time, 5 MB each, with format conversion limited to 3 images. It compresses AVIF, JXL, WebP, PNG and JPG.

The part worth paying for is the API. Tinify gives 500 compressions a month free with no payment method, then charges $0.009 per compression for the next 9,500 and $0.002 for the 10,000 after that. If you want compression inside a deploy step rather than on a laptop, that is a reasonable way to buy it, and it is genuinely better than shelling out to a desktop app from CI.

The trade-off is the obvious one and it is not a small one: your images go to somebody else’s servers. For product photography that is fine. For client work under NDA, medical images, unreleased designs or anything with faces and GPS coordinates in the EXIF, it is a policy decision rather than a technical one. Those 5 MB and 20-file ceilings also rule out a folder of camera RAW exports. The head-to-head is in Smol vs TinyPNG.

Zipic sits at almost exactly our price and covers almost exactly our ground: drag and drop, batch, presets, local processing. Its pricing page lists Personal at $29.99 for two devices and a Team license at $129.99 for ten, both one-time with lifetime updates, and a free tier that runs a seven-day Pro trial then settles at 25 images a day.

It beats us on format breadth in one direction that matters to some people. Its Pro formats include JPEG XL, SVG, APNG and ICNS. Smol writes none of those. If you are producing app icons, optimizing SVG, or experimenting with JXL, Zipic covers cases we do not, and we would rather say so than pretend the list stops where ours does.

It also ships a Windows build, which we do not. We have not benchmarked its encoders, so we are not going to claim we beat it on bytes; treat this entry as a capability comparison, because that is all we can honestly offer. macOS 13 or later.

Compresto covers the same span we do: images, video, GIFs and PDFs, with a drop zone and folder monitoring, processed locally. Its pricing page lists Personal at $49 for one Mac and Standard at $69 for two, one-time with lifetime updates. macOS 13 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon.

The genuinely useful reason to choose it is Setapp. If you already pay that subscription, Compresto is included, and paying $29 or $49 again for a second app that does the same job is hard to justify. We would not.

The published image format list is PNG, JPEG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF and GIF. We did not run it, so there are no Compresto numbers above and there will not be any until we can test it properly. What we can compare is the stated surface area, and on images the two apps land in much the same place.

Optimage’s idea is good: rather than a quality slider, it targets a perceptual quality level and finds the smallest file that meets it, which is roughly the right way to think about compression. At $15 one-time, with a free tier capped at 24 images a day, it is also the cheapest paid app here.

The problem is architectural and it has a date on it. We downloaded the current build from optimage.app today, unpacked it, and ran lipo -archs across every Mach-O binary inside. All thirteen, including the main app and its bundled ffmpeg, Ghostscript, node and cwebp, report x86_64 and nothing else. There is no arm64 slice, so on every Apple Silicon Mac it runs under Rosetta.

Apple announced on 1 September 2026 that “macOS 27: Final release to support Rosetta”, and that Intel-only apps will no longer run on Apple Silicon Macs after that update. The app’s own version history page has no entry newer than 26 November 2021. Buy it if you want, but you are buying software with a published expiry date. We go through the migration options in our Optimage alternatives comparison.