I'm currently experimenting with different tools for optimizing PNG images to figure out strengths/weaknesses of each. Only considering free, ideally open-source, tools that can be run from the command line. For smush.it I just picked pngcrush for no particluar reason and I was thinking that once I have the optimization tool up and running and get the point across that images can be optimized with no human intervention as part of the normal "push" process... then the actual behind-the-scenes png optimizer can be tweaked without affecting the overall workflow.
So, I'm considering these PNG optimizers:
- pngcrush
- optipng
- advpng
- pngout (closed source)
- pngrewrite (only for PNG8)
Can you think of any other PNG optimizers out there? Please comment.
Well, I just came back from a cruise with no internet access ($1/minute is unacceptable!) so I used my laptop's idle time to run some of the tools on a bunch of files (well over 10 000 PNG files, smartly collected right before the cruise 😉 ).
So far some (very preliminary!) results from running the tools.
- pngcrush's
-bruteoption is slower, as expected and usually doesn't help much - pngcrush with
-rem alla(strip all chunks only keeping the transparency chunk) doesn't get much better than-rem none(keep all chunks, even useless ones) - pngout seems to give the best results, but it's probably the slowest
- pngrewrite is only for pallete PNGs (PNG8), it also seems to convert truecolor PNGs with less than 256 colors to PNG8
Again, these are very preliminary and again, please let me know if you know of any other PNG optimizers.
And keep an eye on the YUIblog's img opt series for more detailed report of the results.
