SplatHash

junevm looked at BlurHash and ThumbHash—two popular image placeholder generators that developers use to show something while images load—and said "this is too complicated." So they built SplatHash, which compresses any image down to just 16 bytes. Sixteen. That's smaller than most variable names in your code.

SplatHash reconstructs a blurry preview from those 16 bytes, giving you that nice faded placeholder effect without the overhead of larger hash algorithms. It's written to be simpler and faster than the alternatives, which matters when you're building apps that need to load hundreds of images at scale. The entire thing lives on GitHub and is open source for anyone to use, fork, or improve.

Is it going to replace established libraries overnight? Probably not. But when you're optimizing for performance at scale, every byte counts, and SplatHash is showing that you can get decent image previews with barely any data at all. Sometimes the best engineering is knowing when less is more.