Lossless Optimizers

I've been using lossless optimizers for awhile now for PNGs, but more recently I have found some for other formats. Here's the ones I know about. These are all intended to be lossless, so running them should result in no information loss (well, except the SVG one).

For PNG, there are a number of choices, but my favorite is OptiPNG. It adjust the PNG parameters and recompresses to find the optimal parameters. I run it on almost all my images around here, and I tend to get around 10% to 30% reduction for images fresh off Gimp, Kolourpaint, and ImageMagick.

For JPEG, I use jpegoptim. It works by optimizing the Huffman tables (the lossless part of JPEG compression). I only found this one recently, but I will be using it all the time, like on our new thousands of wedding reception photos.

For PDF, I found something called QPDF. It's designed more for other PDF transformations, but without any other parameters it will simply losslessly optimize a PDF. From what I've seen so far it cuts PDFs down by about a third.

For SVG, Scour is a young project, only a few months old. I've been looking for an SVG optimizer for some time, so this was exciting to find. Due to the type of file it's working with, it's not quite entirely lossless. Visually, it is lossless, but it will toss all metadata (comments, etc.), which may be important. If you hand-crafted your SVG, you won't want to use this tool. It's good for removing Inkscape and Illustrator cruft, though.

I have yet to find a good (Free) GIF optimizer. Animated GIFs, with lots of redundancy between frames, have a lot of potential for optimization too. A video optimizer (for, say, Theora) would be interesting; I imagine it might work similarly to jpegoptim. Audio files (like Vorbis, FLAC, or MP3) probably don't have any room for optimization. I could be wrong. For XHTML there is tidy if you want to count that. All the other XML formats (ODF, RSS, etc.) could have their own too. Or optimizers for archives, like zip and tar. For tar it might rearrange things to better suit gzip, bzip2, or lzma. Executable optimizers? Postscript optimizers? It goes on and on.

If you know about any more, especially for other file formats, let me know.

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Chris Wellons

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