Recommendation: tool for lossless image compression

Hi all, some of you may be familar with Smush.it - a Yahoo tool that lets you reduce file size of images without sacrificing quality. Smush.it used to have a batch tool, but it seems to have disappeared.



After some searching around, I found an excellent tool that lets you add multiple directories of files that you can batch process. its called; XnConvert - [url=“XnConvert · Batch Image Converter | Image convert | XnView.com”]http://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/[/url]



We have around 11,000 images on our CS Cart website. Prior to running the tool, our images directories were 146mb After running the tool, they are now 63.6mb The images are now 53% smaller - that's 53% less bandwidth on the server images, and a much faster page load time.



One of our main products (with around 80 variant images) came in at 1313.7k its now; 439.6k


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            My tips on how to run Xnconvert;


  • assuming your image quality is already decent, the biggest difference you can make is to strip out the metadata in the image. Metadata stores all sorts of redundant info, such as what type of digital camera took the photo. So step 1 is;


  1. add files or folders to the input tab, you can add multiple subdirectories if you want. TIP: copy and paste your image folder FIRST so that you can experiment on a COPY of your images and the desired settings.
  2. Add the action “clean metadata” and tick all options.
  3. On the output tab, set the destination to be the same as the one of your folder AS LONG AS you copied your image folder first!



    3a.Tick the option “keep folder structure” if you have lots of nested subdirectories (such as CS Cart does)

    3b. Also, in the filename option, make sure it only says “{Filename}” and not “{Filename}_result”

    3c. Lastly, under the option “When output file already exists” - change it to; “Replace” Make sure that “Preserve Metadata” is NOT checked. You can also leave the format “As Original” if you are merely wanting to reduce filesize and not convert to another file format.



    Cheers,



    Scott.

Tnx, that can be pretty useful! :)

I recently used a combination of Expandrive to map the image folder and JPG & PGN striper to remove the meta data and Image Converter .EXE

I use a free program called caesium to compress my images (http://caesium.sourceforge.net/)



John

I’m not familiar with Caesium, the main trick is to find an app that let you import multiple levels of directories as Cs Cart creates so many. Then you can batch process with one click, instead of repeating the procedure for a gazillion file or folders. :)

I gotta say I used this tool, reduced my image directory size by almost 50% and the site just feels a lot snappier…



Thanks for sharing.



Shame the program can’t add the ability to compress the images slightly too, most of my images could cope with a little compression would have made an even bigger difference ;)

A very nice batch converter. Thanks for the recommendation Scott.



two questions:

  1. Can anyone recommend best CS-Cart image/thumb settings (for detailed images in particular) to keep image size under control whilst maintaining quality? I've attached a screenshot of my current settings. Any improvement appreciated.
  2. To align with the above, using Xnconvert, I am resizing detailed images to 800x800 (fit) which should retain plenty of detail.

    Thumbnails I am going 320x320. I assume all the thumbs are in the same folder, hence I shouldn't go for 110x110 as this will shrink the images used for product detail pages.



    I'm a MVE user and some vendors tend to upload whatever they have… The means lots of 2MB DSLR pics. My image directory had blown out to 830MB excluding the 'backup' dir. The best one I found? A 7.3MB image that was inside a 320x320 thumbnail folder. That just beat a 9.3MB logo due to it getting hit 00's of times.



    Thanks,

    Ben

For the Mac… try imageoptim.com. has lots of plugins for .png , .jpg etc. Drag and drop.

So to use this tool you download the /images folder, run it through the software, then re-upload?



I see there is an OS X version of XnConvert available. Has anyone used it?

[quote name='kingsleypress' timestamp='1422575884' post='203865']

So to use this tool you download the /images folder, run it through the software, then re-upload?



I see there is an OS X version of XnConvert available. Has anyone used it?

[/quote]



I have the same question. Is there a way to compress images directly on the server?

[quote name='kickoff3pm' timestamp='1365067804' post='159305']

I recently used a combination of Expandrive to map the image folder and JPG & PGN striper to remove the meta data and Image Converter .EXE

[/quote]



Remove the meta data to save more.

I'm using 'compressor.io', this is a free image compression tools and this really the best one I have ever used. You must try this once. This tool have made the image compression the fun. :grin: