Artsy Tuesday: Optipng - PNG Optimizer

Tuesday, July 3. 2007

Posted by Chris Tyler in Artsy Tuesday at 00:01 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Artsy Tuesday: Optipng - PNG Optimizer

Portable Network Graphic (PNG) images are compact and lossless. They're an ideal replacement for GIF images, because they allow high colour depths (more than 256 colours), may contain partially-transparent areas, and are supported by most current graphics applications and all current browsers.

Optipng is a command-line tool for optimizing PNG file sizes. The screenshot shows a sample run which produced a 13% reduction in file size, which is typical and can represent a significant savings in disk (and backup) space as well as transfer requirements for online work if repeated across a library of images. Considering how easy it is to run the optipng, that's a pretty good return on your investment of time. Optipng can also convert images in other formats into PNG.

Installing from the command line: yum install optipng
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Graphics > optipng
Menu location after installation: (n/a)
Command: /usr/bin/optipng
Upstream website: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/

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This is a pretty cool package, but I got unexpected results when I ran it across a whole bunch of PNGs.

To be specific, I got thinking ... "How many PNG files do I have in my overfull filesystem?"

find ./Documents -name .png | wc -l
9462

Wow! Based on my quick tests, it looked like an average of 30% reduction was possible, so that could be some disk space savings. So I fired up a for-loop:

find ./Documents -name .png > /tmp/png-files
for i in `cat /tmp/png-files`; do
optipng $i;
done

Then I put the laptop where the fan could blow all the CPU heat and went to bed. This morning it was all done, and I eagerly went to check the disk savings.

61 MiB.

I mean, that's not terrible. It's something. But not that much. I guess 10,000 PNG files aren't quite as big as I thought they were.

Anyway, thanks for another great package review.

#1 Karsten Wade on 2007-07-03 19:01 (Reply)

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