10 Free Tools to Optimize and Compress PNG Images

Adobe Photoshop, CorelDRAW or MS Paint do not provide good PNG compression effort and other graphics programs like Apple’s Preview software also save PNGs with large amounts of metadata and color-correction data that are generally unnecessary for Web viewing. Below is the list of 10 tools that compresses the PNG files from 5% to about 90% without any loss of quality.

Image [flickr]

1) OptiPNG:

OptiPNG is an advanced PNG optimizer that compresses PNG image files to a smaller size, without loss of quality. Image formats like BMP, GIF, PNM and TIFF can be optimized to PNG with this tool. Download Windows executable: optipng-0.6.2-exe.zip. Do not forget to apply the security patch (optipng-0.6.2.1.diff) for version 0.6.2 (released on 22 Feb 2009):

2) PngOptimizer

GUI based PngOptimizer is a free tool that compresses the PNG Image files by cleaning them of useless or wrong information. Image file types like BMP, GIF, TGA can also be converted into PNG format easily. It works on Windows (2000/XP/Vista). Download PngOptimizer . If you want to use the command line version of PngOptimizer then you can download it from here.

3) Pngcrush

It is a command line utility that can be run from a MSDOS window, or from a UNIX or LINUX command line. Pngcrush is open source and may be used by anyone without fee. Download pngcrush.

4) Pngrewrite

Most of the program writes unnecessarily large palettes while creating PNG files. Pngrewrite, which is a command-line tool reduces the unnecessarily large palettes. It also optimizes transparency settings, and reduces the bits-per-pixel. Download: pngrewrite v1.3.0

5) PNGOUT

It is one of the most widely used utility to optimizes the size of .PNG files losslessly. PNGOUT is widely used for optimizing the web pages or game content onto mobile devices. For a detailed description of the options, check out the PNGOUT tutorial. Download PNGOUT.

6) PNGGauntlet

It uses Ken Silverman’s PNGOUT to optimize PNG files. PNGGauntlet easily shrinks the large size images without loosing any information or quality. Just select the files you want to optimize (or drag them onto the window), select where you want them to go, and click the button. PNGauntlet can also be used to convert JPG, GIF, TGA, PCX, and BMP files to PNG. Download

PNGGauntlet

7) AdvanceCOMP

It is a collection of recompression utilities for your .ZIP archives, .PNG snapshots, .MNG video clips and .GZ files. It’s mainly intended for recompressing your rom, snapshot and clip collection of emulated games. Recompress ZIP, GZ, PNG and MNG files using the Deflate 7-Zip implementation. Recompress MNG files using Delta and Move optimization. Download AdvanceCOMP.

8) ImageOptim

It is GUI tool to optimize PNG and JPEG images. It reduces the file size by finding optimal compression parameters and by removing unnecessary information, like file comments, EXIF tags and color profiles. ImageOptim is free, open-source software. Download ImageOptim 1.0.9

9) Smushit

It is one of the best way to squeeze the size of the image without any loss of data or quality. If you are using firefox browser then just install it as a firefox addon. Just upload a bunch of pictures in your browser. All the changed images are available as a single zip for download. SmushIt firefox Addon

10) Littleutils

The littleutils include a duplicate file finder (repeats), image optimizers (opt-jpg opt-png opt-gif recomp-jpg), file rename tools (lowercase uppercase), archive recompressors (to-bzip to-7zip to-lzma), a tempfile utility (tempname), and more. Download littleutils.

Bunus Tip- OptiPNG and pngcrush both reduce the size of PNG files effectively. AdvanceCOMP and PNGOUT reduce the file size even further, giving the smallest file size possible for a given PNG image. OptiPNG, pngcrush and PNGOUT can remove all color correction data from PNG files (gamma, white balance, ICC color profile, standard RGB color profile) thus further reducing the file size.

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Tagged as: Image Resize, resize image