I wanted to reduce the size of all the images for this website. Usually, ImageMagick is my go-to for image manipulation, but this time I wanted to explore a few other options since I haven't done it in a long time.
To limit my research, I focused just on PNG compression libraries. I currently only have one JPEG, so I didn't want to waste my time on that. Here's the ImageMagick command I used to compress the JPEG:
magick my-image.jpg -strip -interlace Plane -gaussian-blur 0.05 -quality 85% my-image.min.jpgSince I'm writing this post a few days after doing the image-minifying research, I don't remember the few different PNG libraries I compared. But, the most important thing to me is which tool was the best. Presenting, pngquant. It retains alpha transparency, it reduces the color palette, it can create 'lossy' PNGs, and more. Here's the pngquant command I used to compress the images, and using '--speed 1' to use the slowest algorithm and ensure the smallest image size:
pngquant my-image.png --speed 1