Posted on August 25, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Heavy PNG (or JPG/GIF, by the way) files? Get a free and simple Mac tool: ImageOptim!
I use/love/hate/hack WordPress for some websites I run/admin/work for.
Media uploading though – image, namely, has become an issue since every time you upload an image (PNG to be accurate) huge files are being stored along with their smaller thumbnails.
The catch is that WP ( > 3.x) generates thumbnails from uploaded PNGs that are far from optimized and so take a lot of (precious) storage space – and result in being slower when downloaded with mobile devices.
I know that we live in the gigabytes-hosting-giveaway era, but it’s still an issue to me!
At first, I tried with Photoshop, getting PNGs as small as I could but then moved on to a simpler solution.
Meet ImageOptim!
ImageOptim is a free and really simple to use image optimizer that works well to quickly reduce the file size of PNG, JPEG, and GIF image files.
The interface couldn’t get any easier: you just drag and drop images into the app and they’ll be optimized, whether it’s one picture or some hundreds (just in my case) it works the same.
The app works by finding the most suitable compression parameters for the image file type, and then it further reduces file size by removing unnecessary color profiles, EXIF data, and comments from the image itself.
Check it out! Optimization works well and it’s a lot faster than opening something like Photoshop.
You can even optimize ImageOptim itself by adjusting the amount of CPU gear it can use (so that CPU usage is correctly shared along with all other applications running): this is great on my i5 MBP – all 4 cores are devoted to get the job done really quickly.
Try now and find out how much you can optimize/reduce/save your image file – i found PNGs are on average 25% smaller when ImageOptim-treated!
ImageOptim requires Tiger and up, and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch and Polish.
Download ImageOptim here!
