I would like some advice on the best piece of image compression software people recommend? I did have a piece of software but I can’t remember what its called and now on a new machine.
I would be really grateful for any help on the best one to use. My page speed tests keep telling me I need to compress some images. I have ran them all through tinyjpg.com but still saying can get more out of them.
I’ve seen those compression messages as well though. Even re-edited some jpgs because it was reported they weren’t progressive. Made them progressive through Photoshop, uploaded, and still see same message.
You could try one of these software for image optimization:
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[] ImageOptim: This tool is now being offered as an API. I don’t know if it is free for any level of use.
[] Mozjpeg: This is the actual code used behind imageoptim. You could install it on your build / publishing server. As a part of the CMS publishing work flow, you could run the image through mozjpeg/cjpeg commands to reduce quality / losslessly compress the image. (This will work only on JPG images).
[*] Pngcrush: This software works only on PNG images. Again this is a command line tool and the actual code behind ImageOptim’s PNG optimizing software. You could build optimizing PNG images into workflow thoug the software.
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If you are looking for online tools, you can try https://compressor.io/. It doesn’t expose the algorithm being used for the image compression. However, it is one of the better tools that I’ve seen for online use.
I’d suggest that you try the WebP image format developed by Google for lossless and lossy compression of images. This page contains more info, including fallback mechanisms as not all browsers support it yet - Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc.
You can actually preview your site with WebP images - just do a WebPagetest run with Chrome and ‘Enable Data Reduction’ checked in the Chrome tab. This way the reponse will go through the Google Data Saver proxy which compresses all images using WebP. You can then compare the size of your images.
I just saw that yesterday Google announced a new jpeg encoding - Guetzli which produces JPEGs that are “35% smaller than currently available methods”. It doesn’t introduce a new file format (like WebP) so no browser support issues. Maybe it’s worth checking out.
[quote=“Matt_Tomkin, post:1, topic:10165”]
I would like some advice on the best piece of image compression software people recommend? [/quote]
I find that IMAGIFY (https://imagify.io) has the best image compression versus image quality for my purposes. It is most easily used in Wordpress sites as they provide a plugin.
Imagify also make available an API for custom development environments.
Free and very low cost Premium plans are available.
Guetzli compression is very compute intensive. So you’d need to ensure that the server that does this compression is powerful enough. It does have an advantage in that it results in a JPG image and hence should be decoded by all browsers without any special plugin.
Trying to do it on a server would be your first mistake if you have thousands of images… or with images over 150 KB each.
To make sure your server doesn’t kill itself, download a backup of the site and compress the images locally, then upload the files and choose “only if there is a difference in size”.
I’ve successfully used several of the encoders mentioned above. For ease-of-use and excellence of results I standardized on IMAGIFY for all my CMS websites.
Imagify provide both online and WP plugins, and also, free and premium options. The premium cost is very, very low for the typical WP website image volume.
I had a number of coworkers uploading badly optimized images, so I whipped up a quick tool for them to compress jpeg’s using Guetzli. As mentioned by someone else it does take a bit of time to process them.