Dear HN: I wrote a cross-platform GUI image compressor | Hacker News Reader

Dear HN: I wrote a cross-platform GUI image compressor

kilianvalkhof.com

27 pointskilian11 comments

"I wanted an easier way to compress my files that didn’t involve mucking about on the command line or uploading all my images to some server far away via a crappy flash application".

And this is why a 100% cloud future is unlikely to actually happen. Local apps not only use local and cheap computing power, but are often easier and more flexible to use.

Or you could use a good webapp, maybe something like this HTML5 tech demo from Mozilla: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/imageUploader/ (video if you can't run the demo http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edit... )

I got the idea for this a while ago while writing a comment on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032135 and it's done now :)

Neat. I've read that it's inspired in ImageOptim (OS X) and I love this app. It can strip up to 10% of the size of a 180k JPG photo and 60% of a tiny PNG. Will try.

There is one feature that I miss though, and it's some results about the compresion. Like "You saved 120KB (12%) of a total of 20 files (1024KB)".

I was under the impression that PNG/Gif/JPEG are already in compressed form. Your examples also do not show achieving any significant reduction in image size.

It depends on the file. Larger png files can easily get a 20% decrease.

PNG and JPEG already compress the image, but the file format can be compressed still by removing extra data added by for example Photoshop.

Yes they are but they can all be further losslessly compressed (even JPEG) than the output you'd traditionally get from an image editor.

This has become more well-known than it has in the past, so perhaps there is less low-hanging fruit, but it's still a worthy part of your optimisation routine.

I'm not sure I understand the point of saving few kilobytes in an application's images.

Does it change anything for the user?

Faster loading times, especially noticeable on mobile and other slow devices in image-heavy apps.

I think you misunderstood, it's not designed to shrink images that are used in a GUI. It's a GUI based application designed to shrink images (most likely for web sites).

ptipng and advpng are great, but pngout still produces smaller files. Without it, I'll be sticking with imageoptim. I would love for someone to figure out what pngout does and start an open source implementation.

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