Every repo I inherit has the same problem: someone dragged a 4.2 MB hero.png straight out of Figma into /public, committed it, and now every clone and every deploy drags that weight around forever. Git never forgets, so even after you shrink it later, the fat blob lives in history permanently.
The fix isn't "remember to compress images." Humans don't remember. The fix is a pre-commit hook that optimizes any staged image before it ever enters a commit — locally, with no upload to a third-party service.
Here's a setup you can paste in today.
The one-file version (no dependencies beyond what's already on your machine)
If you have pngquant and jpegoptim installed (both are in Homebrew and apt), this is the whole thing. Save it as .git/hooks/pre-commit and chmod +x it:
