The Quick AI Trick to Compress Photos for Faster Sites (No Code)
March 10, 2025
In this no-code walkthrough, Parker shows how to compress a batch of large photos to under 3 MB each using Warp’s AI-powered terminal agent—no coding required and no ad-heavy sites. It’s quick, practical, and keeps your originals safe.
What you need#
- Warp (free) with agent mode
- A folder of photos you want to compress
- Access to a terminal (macOS Terminal shown in video, works similarly on others)
- Optional: ImageMagick (Warp will install it automatically if needed)
Quick setup and start#
- Open Warp and enable agent mode:
- Press Cmd + I to activate the agent.
- Grab the folder path:
- In macOS, right-click the folder and choose Copy “Raw as path name.”
- In Warp, navigate to that folder path and confirm:
- “Compress all photos to under 3 MB while keeping originals.”
- Warp will:
- Inspect file types
- Check for ImageMagick (install if missing)
- Propose the command it will run and ask for your confirmation
- Confirm to proceed. Warp creates a new folder (named compressed) with the optimized images, all under 3 MB each, while originals remain untouched.
- Verify a sample image to confirm quality looks good.
Step-by-step workflow (what actually happens)#
- Warp navigates to your folder and lists the image types.
- If ImageMagick isn’t installed, Warp prompts to install it and you just press Enter.
- Warp generates the batch command to re-encode images with a max size of 3 MB, preserving quality as much as possible.
- It runs, creates a new folder (usually named compressed) containing the optimized files.
- You can repeat the same process for another folder by simply providing the folder name; Warp can search and apply without needing the full path.
Tips and caveats#
- Keep originals: always compression with the originals kept intact.
- Folder naming: the output typically lands in a new folder named compressed.
- If you hit a hiccup, Warp will show the command it’s about to run and may suggest alternatives—you can proceed or adjust as needed.
- The agent approach makes terminal use approachable even if you’re not comfortable with commands.
Other practical uses (demonstrated ideas)#
- Use Warp to batch-download content or transform it on the fly:
- For example, pull a YouTube playlist and convert content to text or blog posts.
- The same agent pattern can orchestrate other tasks without leaving the terminal screen.
Actionable takeaways#
- Use Warp’s agent mode to perform repetitive file operations without learning commands.
- Keep an eye on the max size you want (3 MB in this video) and adjust as needed for faster page loads.
- Use the “search by folder name” capability to apply the same process to multiple folders quickly.
- Always verify a sample file after compression to confirm acceptable quality.
Links#
- Warp - Intelligent terminal with AI agent mode
- ImageMagick - Image processing and compression toolkit
Transcript
let's take a bunch of large photos and compress them without reducing inequality using AI this is going to take like 3 minutes and you don't actually have to know how to code and it won't require going into any spammy websites with a bunch of ads on it I'm Parker X by the way and I ran product at a startup that did $50 million a year before we exited and I teach AI on my channel actual easy stuff to do that's helpful no BS so let's take a look I have two things open let's see let's move some stuff I've got a terminal now don't get scared this literally lets you use AI to just talk to it and it will save you a whole bunch of time I have a terminal open and then I have a bunch of images open now the problem is when you have images that are large they will load really slowly on websites so you want to have large images because it shows the full picture depth all that I don't need to L on on that but you also want to not have them be too large because again it'll SL your site so what I'm going to be using is this tool called warp it's totally free and you can check the description for a link on how to get it and it is a terminal so terminal is the way that you talk to your computer really directly but it's typically really scary because if you're not technical you're like what is this thing but luckily now they have the ability to use what's called an agent where you can just talk to it so once you've downloaded it you will be able to hit command I and it will open up the agent mode which then lets you just type what you want what we're going to do is we're going to have it navigate to this folder and we're going to tell it hey we want to compress these to file sizes no larger than 3 megabytes so we have some in here that are 12 so I've already opened up the folder and one of the tricks here is I can right click the folder and get the path name now path name is basically the route to getting to that folder it's where it is on your system so I can right click this and I'll will copy raw as path name and I'm going to say navigate to here I'll hit enter now it's going to take off cool it's going to give me the command I can hit enter great next I'm going to say I need all the files or all the photos in this folder to be less 3ab but I want to keep the originals please help cool and you don't have to even say stuff like oh you know use this library or use this tool it will just do it so what it's doing now is it's going to walk through all the steps that it's taking so it's kind of thinking through all this and it's saying I'm going to check the files in that folder it says Direct C because that's the technical term and I'm going to see what type of file okay cool I see that there's this type of file it's going to ask if I have the tool that's called image magic downloaded on my computer or not and if I didn't it would say hey let's download it and you just literally hit enter that's kind of the beauty of this thing is you could just have it Go and so it kind of walks me through what it's going to do I say yeah sounds good and hit enter now it's written this thing and it says it's going to write a command that's going to create all the versions of it under 3 megabytes while maintaining the best quality I'm going hit enter so literally all I've done is just said this is what I want and can you go do it and I hit enter twice now this is a real example like this is not edited of how you would deal with an issue because I can see that it's starting to do it but it says Hey like use this command instead of that command so I'm going to just let it go because this would happen to you if you weren't you know watching this video handholding and you might run into an issue when you try to do something else but it looks like let's see you can find this in the compress directory hang on it actually didn't have an issue so let's see oh cool never mind so I thought it was going to have an issue that's even better so what it did was it compressed all of them and then put it in a new folder called compressed Tada now all of these are under 3 megabytes I open one up the quality looks fantastic and that's how you can do it so if you wanted to do this with a different folder what you can do is you just say okay can you go to the name of this folder so I would grab the folder name copy it and say go do the same thing in this folder and you don't even have to tell where it is because it can just search where it is and they can find it so that's how you do it it's really really simple and it should save you a lot of time once you do this one time time then the next times will obviously be a lot easier but you don't have to even remember what the commands are and there's so much powerful stuff that you can do with the terminal especially using warp because you don't have to know any of the commands another use case of this would be I want to go download every song in this YouTube playlist it'll say okay cool let's go get this Library oh I want to take every academic lecture from this YouTube playlist and turn it into blog posts so it'll be like okay cool let's go do that let's download them all we're going to turn them into text files we're going to rewrite them into blog posts so very very powerful and you don't have to leave that one screen if this is helpful make sure you like the video you subscribe and I'll see you in the next one