A Claude Skill That Makes Images Smaller

The cover image on this page is about 20 KB. The file I made was 70 KB.

🤔 Why

That is three times bigger than it needs to be — for a file whose only job is to load. This happens a lot. You make a PNG, you know it is too big, but making it smaller means a website, an upload, a download, and a manual swap. Four steps for a file you already finished. So you skip it and ship the big one.

🤏 What

tiny makes an image smaller with one instruction. It sends the file to TinyPNG, replaces the original with the smaller version, and shows the result:

✓ cover.png  70.3 KB → 19.9 KB  (-50.3 KB, -71.7%)
-- quota: 2 / 500 used this month (498 left)

These numbers are real — this is the cover of this article. PNG, JPEG, and WebP all work. The replace is safe: if anything fails, your original file is not touched.

The second line is the important part. TinyPNG's free plan gives you 500 images per month. But it does not stop at 500 — image number 501 still works, and it charges your card. So tiny counts your usage and stops you before you cross the line:

only 3 free compression(s) left this month but 5 requested.
Compress fewer, or pass --force (may incur charges).

The free plan can never become a paid one by accident. The count resets each month on its own.

🚀 How

1. Install — go to your skills folder, clone the gist, then add a free key once (get one at tinypng.com/developers):

cd ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://gist.github.com/dalirnet/213259ba6e9cf2d3098319f966a5699e.git tiny
bash tiny/tiny.sh set-key <your-key>

Claude finds it in your next session. To update later: cd ~/.claude/skills/tiny && git pull.

2. Use it — give Claude one image, many images, or a glob:

tiny cover.png
tiny assets/*.png
tiny usage          # → 47 / 500 used this month (453 left)

One important note: it replaces the file in place. If you want to keep the original, copy it first.