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The savings are quite remarkable, but you will need to purchase the software to use it without restriction. JPEGmini is a “patent-pending photo recompression technology, which significantly reduces the size of photographs without affecting their perceptual quality.” The creators claim it reduces a file’s size by up to 80%, while maintaining quality that is visually identical to the original. The conversion even maintains alpha-transparency in all browsers, including on iOS and even in IE 6.
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ImageAlpha is unique in its lossy conversion of PNG24 to PNG8, delivering savings many times bigger than popular PNG optimizers such as and TinyPNG. It works by finding the best combination of compression parameters and removes unnecessary comments and color profiles.
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ImageOptim beats any single lossless optimizer by bundling all of them. Each uses different techniques to deliver impressive savings, but they complement each other when combined to offer better savings still. With this trio, we have a specialist in JPEGs, another in PNGs, and a great all-round application, ImageOptim, which also supports GIF and other formats. I’ve been using ImageOptim for many years, with ImageAlpha and JPEGmini joining it more recently. However, how great a loss in quality is noticeableand how much is acceptable will vary from person to person, project to project and image to image. The report shows us how much data each tool saves and how much quality was lost statistically. To inform our work, I ran the most popular image optimization tools over a varied sample of images (kindly donated by Daan Jobsis via his “ Retina Revolution” article), and I’ve published the results on GitHub. Regardless of which you choose, you will likely speed up your website and keep users happy. If you’re not currently using any image optimization tool, I would urge you to choose one.
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