PUNIG

Since most mobile phones are equipped with powerful cameras, almost all pictures you take end up in a high-quality format. However, processing them might lead to loss, or make them take up a lot of disk space. On the other hand, you can rely on specialized applications such as PUNIG to attempt to compress pictures.

First thing you notice is that you’re not taken through a setup process to ensure functionality. This means it can be easily carried around on a thumb drive, but the computer you use it on needs to be fitted with .NET Framework for everything to work as intended.

Note that the application is merely a visual design for the OptiPNG command line tool, thus aiming to make the host program more accessible in case you don’t really fancy using Command Prompt. On the bright side of things, OptiPNG doesn’t even have to be on your computer, because PUNIG bundles everything it needs.

As far as the visual design is concerned, there’s not much to look at, but the general layout is pretty intuitive to allow individuals of all levels of experience to get the hang of things. You get to work with a single window form, which bundles together all insert and processing options.

In order to add files to the operation you need to use the browse dialog, because drag and drop is not supported. You can either pick multiple pictures, or load the content of an entire folder. Pictures you work with need to be under formats like PNG, TIF, TIFF, BMP, and GIF. However, output is always a PNG file, which means the tool can also serve as a means of conversion.

The total number of items you add is shown in a details field, while names are enlisted in a dedicated table for easy management. Before processing, you can choose the compression efficiency level, with a higher value taking longer to finish the task if an abundant of files are added.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that PUNIG comes with good intentions, but little effort is invested into development, making the program run into several issues along the way. This makes OptiPNG a more reliable method, even though it’s used from a command line interface.