Squash Alternative for Mac: Batch Photo Editor or Compressor?

Three situations where Squash is the better choice.

The batch needs to look finished, not just smaller. Squash lists watermarks (layered, with your own images and fonts), eight included filters, brightness and contrast controls and renaming on its product page. If you stamp a logo on a hundred product photos and rename them in one pass, Smol cannot do any of that.

You are on an older macOS. Realmac says Squash requires macOS Big Sur or later. Smol needs macOS 13 on Apple Silicon or macOS 14 on Intel. A Mac stuck on Big Sur or Monterey can run Squash and not Smol.

You want a guarantee. Realmac’s purchase page states a 30-day money-back guarantee. We offer no trial and no refunds, so for a tool you have not used, that is a real advantage.

It is, if you want a batch image editor on a Mac and the price on the purchase page suits you.

Squash 3 is a native app, described by Realmac as written in Swift and SwiftUI, and it works on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Its release notes show 3.3.0 as the newest entry, which Realmac announced on 18 November 2024 as compatibility with macOS Sequoia plus bug fixes. We found no later release, and the product page still shows Buy and Download buttons, so we are not calling it abandoned. It is simply about eleven months since the last release we could find.

One point to check before buying: when we looked, the purchase page showed placeholder prices, so we do not state Squash’s cost or licence terms. Confirm them on Realmac’s own page. If price is what sent you looking, Smol is $29 once and updates are free.

Realmac’s product page describes images only. We found no mention of PDF, video or audio compression, and no list of supported formats, so we make no claim about formats Squash writes beyond JPG, which its page uses as an example.

That gap is the main reason people end up with two apps. A designer who exports a folder of photos, a PDF proof and a screen recording needs three different tools unless one handles all of them. Smol compresses all three types from the same window and mixes them in a single batch. See how to compress a PDF on Mac and how to compress a video on Mac for how the methods compare.

The reverse list is longer than we would like. Smol has no watermarks, filters or renaming, and we are not going to build them: it is a compressor.

Drag the same files or folder onto Smol, pick a quality, and it writes a copy beside each original with a _compressed suffix.

Three settings matter on day one. First, image quality runs 0 to 100 and defaults to 75. Second, images are resized to fit inside 2000 × 2000 px by default, which suits web use and not print, so change it if you work with large files. Third, metadata is stripped by default, which includes copyright and contact fields. All three can be changed.

If you used Squash presets for repeat jobs, recreate the settings as a Smol preset. Presets are saved in the app on that Mac. For recurring folders, a Finder Quick Action or a watched folder removes the step of opening the app. Watched folders can make already-optimized files larger, so point them only at folders of fresh files such as screenshots or camera exports.

Watermarks and filters are the part you cannot move. Keep Squash for that step, or run Smol after the editing is done.

It depends on which part of Squash you are replacing.

• Pure image compression with a free price: Caesium handles JPEG, PNG and WebP at no cost.
• Automatic optimization of screenshots and the clipboard: Clop.
• Another $29 Mac app with a similar price: Picmal.

The full ranking is in the best image compressor for Mac, and the numbers behind our image claims are on the benchmark page. In that test, Smol’s AVIF needed 22 to 26% fewer bytes than the best JPEG at the same SSIMULACRA2 score, measured on 24 small (768 × 512) photographs, so treat it as a guide and not a promise for your own camera files.