Sukat Inspector: Stop Hunting for Oversized Images in DevTools

If you do WordPress or SEO work, one task keeps eating afternoons: figuring out which images are bloating a page. The pattern is familiar. PageSpeed Insights flags "properly size images" and "efficiently encode images," hands you a list of URLs, and now you're in the Network panel sorting by size, copying filenames, ctrl-F'ing the DOM to work out whether 2023-banner-v3-FINAL-final.jpg is the hero or an orphaned thumbnail nobody's looked at since 2023.

On a client site with thirty-plus images, that's twenty minutes of detective work before a single byte changes. We got tired of doing it, so we built a tool to skip the detective work entirely. It's called Sukat Inspector, it's a free Chrome extension, and it's on the Chrome Web Store.

This post is part announcement, part explanation of the decisions behind it — because a few of them aren't obvious.

What it actually does

Click the toolbar icon, hit Scan. A second or two later you get every image on the page in one table:

• Natural dimensions next to displayed dimensions, so a 4000×2667 photo crammed into a 600px slot is obvious at a glance
• Real file size — fetched from where the image lives, not guessed from the dimensions
• Format (JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, SVG)
• Whether alt is missing, because if you're already looking at every image you might as well catch the accessibility gaps too

Sort by size, filter to oversized-only or anything over 100 KB or missing-alt or a specific format. The worst offenders sort to the top, which is the entire point — the 4 KB icon doesn't matter, the 1.8 MB hero does.

The part DevTools doesn't do

Here's what the Network panel can't do well: tell you which image on the page a filename actually is. So Inspector has a hover behavior — mouse over a row and the extension draws a box around that exact image on the page and scrolls it into view. This was the feature we most wanted to exist. Filenames lie; the highlighted box doesn't.

It took more iterations than expected to get right. Tracking an element's position while the page scrolls, handling lazy-loaded images that aren't in the DOM yet, keeping the overlay alive through React re-renders — none of it was hard exactly, but the obvious first implementation broke on roughly half the sites it was tested on.

Compressing without the upload dance

Once you've found the bloat you have to fix it, and the normal flow is miserable: download the image, find a compressor, upload it, wait, download the result, repeat. Sukat — the tool this whole site is built around — already does target-file-size compression in the browser, so Inspector wires straight into it.

Click Compress on one row, or "Compress all oversized" for the whole flagged set. Sukat opens with the images queued, you pick a target size, you get them back — a ZIP if it's a batch. One tab, no uploads, no re-finding the compressor.

That "one tab" detail is deliberate. The first build opened a separate tab per image. On a page with 12 oversized images that's 12 tabs, which is genuinely awful to use. The current version sends the whole batch into a single Sukat instance instead — a lesson learned the unglamorous way, by shipping the bad version first and immediately regretting it.

Why nothing gets uploaded — and why that's not just marketing

This is the design decision that matters most, so it's worth being precise instead of hand-wavy about it.

When you compress an image through the extension, Inspector fetches that image's bytes from wherever the image already lives — the same request your browser already made to render the page — and passes them to the Sukat tab using Chrome's local messaging between the extension and the page. The bytes move from the extension to the Sukat tab inside your own browser. Sukat then compresses them with the Canvas API, also locally.

There is no Sukat server anywhere in that path. There is no Sukat backend at all — the whole thing is static hosting. The extension has no analytics, no tracking, no telemetry, and it doesn't even use localStorage. The claim is verifiable: scan a page, switch to airplane mode, and compression still works on the images already loaded. That's not something you can fake.

Who it's for

It was built to scratch our own itch, but if your work looks like this, it'll help:

• Core Web Vitals audits for clients. Scan, sort by size, export the CSV, paste into the report. The remediation list builds itself.
• SEO audits. Oversized images turn up on nearly every audit. This turns a twenty-minute dig into a thirty-second check, and the missing-alt flags ride along for free.
• WordPress maintenance. Media libraries are where full-resolution uploads go to get displayed at 150px. Inspector finds them on any page, not one upload at a time.
• Pre-launch review. A 2 MB hero nobody remembered to optimize is a classic. A scan before deploy catches it.

It works on anything with an <img> or a CSS background — WordPress, Shopify, custom React, static sites.

Install it

It's on the Chrome Web Store, free, no account, no ads, no premium tier. Same model as everything else here.

Add Sukat Inspector to Chrome — Free

Chrome and Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi) work now. Firefox is on the roadmap. Safari isn't — Apple's extension model would mean rebuilding it almost from scratch, and that time is better spent elsewhere.

What's coming

This is v1. Audit, hover-to-locate, single and batch compress, the privacy architecture — all working today. Next on the list: a toolbar badge showing the oversized count without opening the popup, a configurable size threshold (100 KB is the default; it shouldn't be everyone's), and Firefox support.

If you hit a site where the scan misses images or the handoff does something strange, that feedback genuinely shapes the next version. The 50-image batch cap, for example, is staying until someone actually reports hitting it — there's no point optimizing a limit nobody's reached.

If you maintain sites or audit them, grab it and run it on the next slow page you open. The bloat is almost always sitting right there in plain sight.

About Sukat

Privacy-first browser tools

Sukat builds free, privacy-first browser tools for compressing images and verifying published content. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.