As a blogger and a normal guy who is running out of space on his hard drive, I am always on the lookout for a good image compression program. My software of choice for all image editing needs is of course, the Big Daddy of them all – Adobe Photoshop. If I have to plonk down my money, I would go for a nice little piece of freeware called RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool).Sometimes, I am loathe to fire up Photoshop for a simple image compression job. Then sometimes, I am mobile and away from RIOT too. Thanks to the plethora of image editing apps available on the web, I am spoilt for choice.
What I am looking for are fast, clean (i.e. uncluttered), and efficient image optimizers that are dead simple to use. I have found three so far…
JPEGmini
JPEGmini welcomes you with a very attractive homepage that instantly says something about its potential quality. Not surprisingly, it is also available as a Mac application. But we will be looking at the web version here. JPEGmini can reduce the size of any JPEG file by as much as 80% without affecting image quality. JPEGmini uses its image quality detector and its unique JPEG encoder to achieve optimum image recompression rations without any visible image artifacts to spoil the quality of the image.
Here are some key features:
- Single photos do not require any sign-ups, though batch uploading of full photo albums requires free registration.
- On JPEGmini each album that you upload can contain up to 1000 photos, and can be up to 200 MB in size.
- You can upload as many albums as you want.
Yahoo!Smush.it
Smush.it is also a lossless tool like JPEGmini. It compresses images and photos without any noticeable difference in their visual quality. The optimization method of Smush.It strips unnecessary bytes from image files and then gives you a downloadable ZIP file with the optimized image. Smush.it also tells you the savings you can achieve with the image compression. Privacy of your uploaded images is assured to degree because the files are only temporarily cached on the site. They are removed after a certain time. We have taken a deeper look at Smush.it when we saw how to Optimize and Compress Pictures Online with SmushIt.
Here are some key features:
- Smush.it works on JPG, GIF, and PNG images that are up to one megabyte in size.
- Smush.it converts GIF files to PNG files when the resulting PNG files are smaller.
- Smush.it preserves the meta-data of the photos during the compression process.
- Smush.it handles individual image files. It still does not have the feature to compress a folder of images in one go.
Kraken
Kraken is that terrible but mythical sea monster that you probably last heard about in the Pirates of The Caribbean. Here, Kraken serves a very useful purpose as a neat free and online image optimization tool. Kraken is actually a set of tools, where the image optimizer is one part of the set. The image optimizer also gives you browser extensions you can use with Firefox and Chrome. You can browse to the images on your hard drive and attach them, or drag and drop them to the Kraken interface. You can also use the URL paster option to enter multiple URLs and process them all as a batch. Kraken comes with two optimization levels – Advanced and Extreme. In the end, you can download each file individually or collect them all in a ZIP file.
Here are some key features:
- Kraken supports JPEG, PNG and GIF files.
- Kraken Image Optimizer allows for 1 MB file size limits. You can process 20 files in one single batch.
- Kraken also gives you PDF optimization report that shows the level of compression and other data.
Conclusion
I used the same single image originally sized at 515 KB and passed it through the three compression programs. Without any discernible difference in visual quality, JPEGmini gave me the best compressed image. But do try it out with your own set of images too and tell us the result.Do you use a desktop tool like Photoshop or an online web app to compress your images? If you bother about image optimization, tell us about the tool of your choice? Is it anything like the three simple ones we have covered here?
Image Credit: Hand compresses a colour sphere via Shutterstock
