pngquant

Regardless of whether you are managing a website or you enjoy posting pictures from your daily experience on a regular basis, one of the issues you are likely to confront yourself with is that your photos are too large and cannot be uploaded to the website or blog.

pngquant is a small piece of software that enables you to reduce the size of the PNG files as much as 70%, but without affecting the quality of the picture and preserving the full alpha transparency.

It is important to note that the app is a command-line utility and hence, does not come with an interface. If you are unfamiliar with Windows's console, then you might experience some troubles using the program for processing your photo collection.

It would have been nice if the application included some sort of GUI where you can add the folder you want to process with a simple drag and drop. Then again, let us not forget that advanced users can obtain the same result, but only faster.

The idea behind the application is to enable you to generate images that are compatible with all the modern web browsers. You can use the dedicated commands to only save the processed files that are actually smaller than the original image.

Even though PNG files are known to use lossless compression, you can specify if the utility should save pictures that are substandard from the quality point of view. Moreover, you can disable the Floyd-Steinberg dithering, specify the output lower-precision color you want to prefer and save the processed images using a suffix and prefix, so you can find them faster on your local drives.

In the eventuality that you are uploading dozens of pictures on various photo sharing services or social networks on a daily basis, then pngquant is a utility that can help you avert headaches associated with the images' sizes.