What programs besides Photoshop are good for saving and optimizing images for web?
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1Every Lower-cost / free alternative to Photoshop should also be suitable for this. If you're a designer doing images manually, I'd try those before trying automated programming options like ImageMagick suggested below– user56reinstatemonica8Jun 18, 2014 at 16:50
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9 Answers
ImageMagick is a great tool to use that would require some understanding of how a terminal is to be used. However, the documentation is done very well so you can reference a lot of examples.
The area you might find useful is Command-Line Options and if you want you can use their tool: ImageMagick MagicStudio.
There was an article by Creative Blog that covered this back in January called: "The 18 best image file compression tools"
answered Jun 18, 2014 at 16:14
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I'll second this, I run ImageMagick on web servers to resize images uploaded via a CMS. It usually gives a nice quality and always reduces the size substantially.– JasperJun 18, 2014 at 17:11
Pretty much any bitmap image manipulation software will do. It depends on how complex you want to go; how steep learning curve you are interested in.
Optimising for web is a bit of a misnomer these days: it is really hard to make bad images good regardless of software. As to file sizes and types, it is more dependant on loading times.
Some examples of software are Gimp, Paint and Irfanview.
Using ImageOptim on OSX never let me down so far. It's easy to use (drag-drop) and very efficient:
ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster —
by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments
and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.
It bundles open-source (commandline) tools as far as their licenses allow:
ImageOptim seamlessly integrates best optimisation tools: PNGOUT, Zopfli,
Pngcrush, AdvPNG, extended OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpegrescan, jpegtran,
and Gifsicle.
Furthermore, it can be integrated into a XCode workflow (iOS development and stuff).
In additon, ImageAlpha from the same author can be used to reduce 24-bit PNG images:
ImageAlpha greatly reduces file sizes of 24-bit PNG files (including alpha
transparency) by applying lossy compression and conversion to a more
efficient PNG8+alpha format. Such images are compatible with iOS,
all browsers, and even degrade well in IE6.
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Here is a related answer that shows how to use
optipngandadvdefwith PNGs on the terminal superuser.com/a/700963/252532 Jan 1, 2016 at 17:52
I would recommend http://compressor.io/. It supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG which is super helpful when it comes to image quality (as well as lossless/lossy compression options).
Unfortunately you can't compress in bulk. For bulk optimization, you could try https://shrinkray.io/ (will compress all images, 50 at a time, in your repo).
I know it's crazy, but I like to mess around with some PHP image functions. Sometimes just running:
<?php
imagepng(imagecreatefrompng("input.png"),"output.png");
Can vastly reduce filesize.
Mess around with a few more functions, and I've managed to produce PNG files that even pngcrush... only succeeds in making bigger.
answered Jun 18, 2014 at 16:50
If you're looking for a good PNG compressor, have a look to pngquant. It's very simple to use and very effective. I tried few other compressors, but they were either too complicated for me or less effective.
Another online tool: http://optimizilla.com
It provides manual quality control.
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Welcome to GD! Do you mind providing a little more detail about the link you have provided because at this time your answer is a link only answer.– user9447Jul 2, 2014 at 16:37
Now i use optimimage with nodejs, but i've used PNG Gauntlet for a lot.
There are many programs to do this. Like prepros and others.
