Reducing JPEG Files Sizes While Keeping the Quality

[Mr.Carlyle]

]Speaking of the file size... it really is too large. Do something about it. Maybe you can reduce the JPEG quality factor

Well finally I found something useful for Windows! Don't believe me then try it for yourself and be amazed.

Take your high quality large file sized jpeg and open it with MSPaint...yes the native paint application that comes standard with Windows. Once you have it opened in MSPaint, then just save that file (With the same or different name) as a JPEG and be completely amazed at the drastic reduction in file size without any quality reduction! I do not lie.


I wanted to post this because I saw the divVerent was speaking about taking down the quality of a JPEG to get a smaller size. Please try my above method before you do this. You won't be disappointed.

[divVerent]

lol, the MS Paint method DOES reduce quality, but to a reasonable level. Same thing as I did with jpegoptim --strip-all -m95 or -m90 (NOT -m85). Which of the methods you use is your choice.

[Mr.Carlyle]

lol, the MS Paint method DOES reduce quality, but to a reasonable level. Same thing as I did with jpegoptim --strip-all -m95 or -m90 (NOT -m85). Which of the methods you use is your choice.

Aww, I was under the impression that it didn't. Damn div, you must have a script that contacts you whenever someone uses your name, cause that reply was fast.

[Shoe]

Funny, I remember Paint making JPEGs look like crap But that was back on Windows 98, I stopped using Paint a good while before I upgraded to XP.

I guess that's one way to go about optimization

[Ed]

There are tools for doing this sort of operation. I have done quite a lot of work in this area having written a shell script for brute force compression of ODF files.

This is what I use in a bash script:

Code: Select all

jpegoptim --strip-all --quiet *.jpg   # Optimise JPEG's losslessly

     for a in `ls *.jpg`
           do
jpegtran -progressive -outfile $a $a #.prog $a
done;
jpegoptim --strip-all --quiet *.jpg   # Optimise JPEG's losslessly
jpegoptim --strip-all -m95 --quiet *.jpg   # Cap JPEG's at m%

for a in `ls /*.jpg`
           do
jpegtran -progressive -outfile $a $a
done;
jpegoptim --strip-all --quiet *.jpg   # Optimise JPEG's losslessly


On some very bad JPEG's made with Photoshop I have reduced the size of a JPEG to 3% of the original file. Normally you don't get anything like that, 20% is good.

[Ed]

Funny, I remember Paint making JPEGs look like crap But that was back on Windows 98

Actually back then Paint didn't support any compressed formats at all so you must have had some really bad JPEG's!

[Shoe]

Actually you could get it to support them, somehow installing Microsoft PictureIt! made it support compressed formats... kind of a roundabout way of doing so, but it worked.