Compress & Optimize Images Easily with ImageOptim for Mac OS X
If you’re concerned about the file size of images you should grab ImageOptim, a free image compression tool that is drag & drop simple. Store the app in the Dock and toss a single picture or group of images onto the app and they will immediately be compressed without reducing much image quality by finding optimum compression parameters and stripping color profile information and other metadata from the files.
On average the image size savings are about 15-35%, making it a very useful tool for web designers, developers, publishers, bloggers, app developers, or anyone else that wants to reduce image file size and bandwidth requirements. ImageOptim works great for PNG, JPEG, and even GIF animation.
For command line users, use the “open” command to pass wildcards to ImageOptim for easy scripting and bulk image compression like so:
open -a ImageOptim.app ~/Pictures/SaveToWeb/*.jpg
There is also a separate system service available to download that lets you right-click on images to compress them directly from the OS X Finder.
Great find from @MacGeekPro on Twitter, don’t forget to follow @OSXDaily too!
I need help installing this. Please help me.
The guy says on his site that Apple won’t put it on the App Store because they forbid free apps. Really? Is that why there’s thousands and thousands of free apps on The App Store. Thanks, but no thanks, wacko. I have a feeling they rejected it for other reasons.
Why do you think it was rejected? Daringfireball wrote about this app like 2 weeks ago.
He can’t put it on the App Store because the software in it is GPL’d. The terms of the GPL basically forbid you from distributing binaries under the limitations of the App store. So when he says “Free”, he means free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Wow, you completely missed the mark — and revealed yourself to be a bit of a jerk. At least the “wacko” wrote something useful.
We’ve made a bunch of games for iPads and based on reading the docs made all of our images PNGs. But that resulted in huge file sizes, especially for games that use photos. So we switched to JPEGs for the content. Buttons are still PNGs.
In our first batch of games we used PhotoShop at 30% quality setting. The pictures are OK looking but you can see some artifacts, especially when there are large areas of the same color, like skies. For our current game, we experimented with ImageOptim. The compressed images are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. Unfortunately, ImageOptim only has an 80% setting and running two passes gets you as small as you are going to get. This is significantly smaller than Photoshop—but not as small as you can get with a lower quality setting in Photoshop. Since there are no sounds in this game, we’ll probably go with ImageOptim.
Here are some stats for 3673 pictures at 644×498.
Originals: 1,140.0 MB
ImageOptim 80% 249.6 MB
ImageOptim 2nd Pass 238.9 MB
Photoshop 80% 323.9 MB
Photoshop 50% 249.8 MB
50% with ImageOptim 241.3 MB
Photoshop 30% 166.7 MB
[...] data is really easy to remove with the help of ImageOptim, a free Mac tool we’ve discussed before that compresses and optimizes images. In that process of optimizing a photo, ImageOptim also strips [...]