Shrink image file sizes with ImageOptim

Posted on by Jeff Riegel, Producer/Editor

November 1, 2012

By Lex Friedman, Macworld

ImageOptim 1.4.0 helps not just the developers and designers who use the software, but also any of those users’ users, too. Let me explain: The free utility takes in your PNG, JPEG, and GIF files (including GIF animations) and optimizes them by shrinking their file sizes, often considerably. And it does so without affecting the image quality.

 

 

That’s all it does, but that one feature makes ImageOptim tremendously useful to Web developers and iOS and Mac app developers. Keeping file sizes down by shrinking images without any loss in quality can quickly become a big deal: It saves bandwidth for everybody, and the numbers can add up quickly. (Shave a few hundred kilobytes off your popular website’s homepage, and you could save gigabytesof bandwidth over the course of a year.

ImageOptim’s interface is Spartan but functional. Drag images onto its window or Dock icon, or click on the plus (+) button to select images from a standard Open dialog box. The app immediately starts optimizing the images, using one or more of a slew of command-line image optimization tools: PNGOUT, AdvPNG, Pngcrush, extended OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpegrescan, jpegtran, and Gifsicle are all seamlessly integrated. ImageOptim doesn’t offer a whole lot of insight into what it’s doing, but you can mouse-over an individual image on the list to see which tool the app is using to shrink the image.

Alongside each filename, ImageOptim lists its file size (in bytes), and the percentage by which the file size was shrunk from the original. That number can vary widely depending upon your source image, but I’ve compressed some images more than 80-percent.

While I wish ImageOptim included a running total of just how much smaller all the files in a given batch are combined, that’s at worst a minor oversight. The app works efficiently, it’s brain-dead simple to use, and it does just what it promises.

 

 

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For two decades, Jeff Riegel was a senior level Producer/Editor for the Department of Defense and various government contractors in Northern Virginia. Outside of the workplace, Jeff keeps himself busy with the creation of festival worthy documentaries "Tori Nelson: Fighting for Her Future" and the once nominated and two-time Emmy award winning "A Journey of Education and Remembrance." His short film "The Great Realisation" captured the eyes at 18 international film festivals with various winning honors; a poem that takes on heavy themes such as fevered capitalism, man-made ecological issues, digital addiction during the global Covid blight. Jeff is looking for funding investors and co-producing "The Lost Clipper," a two+ decades project about the first hijacking in U.S. history and the search for those 15 lost souls abducted in 1938, the true first act of war with Japan. Filming takes him to Micronesia, Guam, Hawaii, Canada, and locations across the U.S. (see www.LostClipper.com) He enjoys creating media-marketing social networking campaign for personalities such as 13-time world boxing champion Tori Nelson, Netflix's "Narcos" personalities Steve Murphy and Javier Pena, and renowned landscape photographer Frank Lee Ruggles. Jeff is eager to attack any project head-on. Jeff's Motto: think beyond convention...and consider it done!