Little bird.
Lighter files.

No. Already-compressed files may stay as they are: when a copy would not be at least 1% lighter, Smally keeps the original and the row says Already small. Results depend on the file and its format. Lossy compression changes image data; compare important details before using the saved copy.

PDFs with photos or scans get lighter: Smally recompresses the images inside, one by one, only as far as the page still looks the same, and leaves text and vector pages as they are. A PDF that is mostly text, like a typical office document, often comes out less than 1% lighter, and then Smally keeps the original. Illustrator PDFs get a lighter copy for sharing, with Keep Illustrator editing one click away.

Accessibility tags, bookmarks, fillable forms, links to other pages in the same PDF, and comments or highlights stay in the copy, and Smally checks that nothing else in the file changed; if it cannot show that, it leaves the PDF as it is and says why. PDF/A files: Smally makes the copy by changing only the images inside. The PDF/A declaration and its color profile stay as they were, and Smally does not validate PDF/A conformance afterwards. It also leaves these PDFs as they are: digital signatures, attached files, audio or video, actions or scripts that run when it opens, and PDF/X print-production files. Password-protected or damaged PDFs are skipped too, with a note that says what to do. It is not a general PDF editor.

Drop an MP4, MOV or M4V and Smally makes a lighter copy for chat and social: H.264, up to 1080p and 30 frames a second, with the HDR an iPhone records (HLG) converted so the colours look right on any screen. Video copies are made for sharing, so they can look a little different from the original: compare them side by side in the preview before you rely on one. A copy is kept only when it is at least 10% lighter than the original.

Some videos are skipped, with the reason: protected files, slow motion, HDR10 and Dolby Vision profile 5, other wide-colour video, and clips with more than one video track. The copy is made with x264, a separate program included in Smally under the GPL; its source code is at downloads.meetsmally.com/source/x264-0.165.3222.

Not yet. iPhone photos come in upright, and Display P3 and other color profiles are converted to sRGB. HDR photos in HEIC, the iPhone's usual format, keep their bright highlights; when a copy can't, Smally says so. Animated images, images in other HDR formats, 10- and 16-bit images and CMYK images are skipped, with a sentence that says what to do instead. A still GIF, TIFF or BMP is read and saved as a PNG copy; animated GIFs, multi-page TIFFs and JPEG XL are not supported yet.

For some PNGs the preview also offers As WebP, a different format that is shown only when it comes out lighter than the PNG copy.

Yes: Smally in the browser, for JPEG, PNG and WebP images, at meetsmally.com/compress. It takes pictures up to about 24 megapixels on most computers, and up to 12 on a phone, a tablet, or a computer whose browser reports 4 GB of memory or less or two processor cores or fewer. Smally for Mac also compresses AVIF, PDFs and videos, and takes bigger pictures. It opens HEIC photos too; the next answer says what it does with them.

Smally opens them, but it cannot check a smaller HEIC against its quality rule yet, so it keeps the original. The row can offer As JPEG, a copy that opens on any computer, phone or website; Smally makes this copy for photos up to 40 megapixels, including 12-megapixel iPhone photos. If the copy comes out no lighter or cannot be written, it keeps the HEIC and the row says why. The JPEG is often larger than the HEIC and keeps no date, camera or location.

The list holds up to 50 files at a time; Clear Finished makes room for more. Images and PDFs can be up to 200 MB, most images up to 40 megapixels (HEIC up to 120), and PDFs up to 100 pages. Videos can be up to 8 GB.

For JPEGs, Smally also tries a lossless repack of the same pixels, and picks it when it comes out nearly as light, since it keeps every pixel.

Open the download and move Smally into your Applications folder. Smally checks for updates when you open it, every hour while it stays open, and when you come back to it; you choose whether to install. Automatic install stays off. You can also choose Smally → Check for Updates…, or download the latest version here and replace your installed copy.

See Version & checksum above for the latest signing details.

Use Feedback at the bottom of the Smally window: write a few words and send. App details are optional, and your files never leave your Mac. You can also write to smally@innerforce.com.

Smally checks for updates when you open it and while it is open. That check asks our download server for a small file, the way any app or browser asks a website for a page. We use those checks to learn roughly how many Macs run Smally each day and which version they run, so we know when an old version can be retired. For each check we compute a one-way code from a secret only we hold, the day and the details your Mac sends with any request, and keep only that code, the date and the Smally version. The count does not keep your IP address, your user agent or anything that names you, the code changes every day so it cannot be followed from one day to the next, and we set no cookie. Smally itself adds no analytics and sends none of your files or their names. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, as any host does; those are separate from this count.

How many times its engine starts, how many times it fails and with which error code, and which Smally for Mac links are clicked, by day. Each count is just a number: no cookie, no ID, and nothing that identifies you or your files. Your files never leave this tab.

That record is stored with the time it happened and, within two days, added into a total for the day and deleted. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, as any host does; those are separate from these counts.