Legit Reviews

I've been using these two programs off and on for awhile and just thought I'd share with the rest of the class...the first program is called PNGOUT and it will simply optimize a PNG file and make it as small as possible while keeping 100% image quality. Be sure you download the free command line version for this.

The second is called PureJPEG and it also makes files smaller but not through compression (so if it's straight from a camera you may want to run it through a JPEG compressor as well) it strips all the extra info attached to the JPG such as focal length and exposure time etc. It can significantly shrink the file size but make a backup first unless you're certain you won't need that info (say, you're uploading it to your website).

I really like both these tools, I just never mentioned them before because they are command line only and well, most people wouldn't bother. Well I've been messing around a bit and wrote a regfile that will add them both to the right context menu to make it super simple to use either (Big thanks to Scott Hanselman).

Put pngout.exe and purejpeg.exe (rename to match exactly, if needed) in C:\WINDOWS\system32\ and run the following two reg files - PNGOUT reg file - PureJPEG reg file

These two reg files contain hex code because regedit is bitchy and that is the only way it will create the entries in the string type needed for this to work. If you would like to verify the hex code feel free to but it's pretty boring stuff TBH.

If all went well after running the reg file you should be able to right click on a PNG or (non animated) GIF and select PNGOUT or do the same for JPGs and PureJPEG. Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: While I (and others) have tested these reg files and confirmed them to work in both XP and Vista, if something should go wrong, I hold no responsibility whatsoever

Nice touch with the registry tweaks. ^_^

Dan

Updated the original thread with code that actually works

FYI, you can utilise PNGout as a plugin download package for irfanview.com freeware graphics software too > http://i4memory.com/61904-post3.html

Not everyone likes or uses IrfanView (I find it to be quite slow and too simple, plus I have far more powerful tools at my disposal) but to each his own...besides I actually just found another program that seems to work better than PNGOUT...and it has a GUI. I went ahead and wrote a regedit for the CL version because I like being able to run it that way but the regedit I did only works in Vista, also since there is a GUI version I see no reason to post it (if someone would like a copy of the regfile just ask, though I'll probably end up figuring out how to make the regedit work in XP as well).

PngOptimizer

I like/use irfanview

But yeah, I agree it is a slower than the commandline version.

Dan

out of box maybe slower if you set passes from unlimited to 1 or 2 it's much faster

but will try pngoptimizer too

edit: pngoptimizer is definitely faster at expense of that little bit extra compression

_test and _test_256 (256bit) PNG are originals




irfanview 75kb vs pngoptimizer 81kb (maximizer compression enabled)

but yeah thanks for heads up

That's odd, on my test file PngOptimizer was around 1kb smaller than PNGOUT...they're both great programs either way though and they seem to be very close in file size...this was the test file I used btw: http://fedoranews.org/ThomasGuide/Wallp ... per_01.png