In with PNGOUTWin

In case you didn't already know, PNG is an image format that's superior to GIF in just about every way. Like GIF, it supports 8-bit color depth (a 256 color palette), transparency, and interlacing. However, PNG allows for various color depths, which means it's even good for complex artwork with gradients that have way more than 256 colors. Another useful feature is -- get this -- partially transparent pixels. (IE 6, however, doesn't display them as such. Firefox does.)

Anyway, I realized in October 2004 that PNG would be also be a useful tool for archiving line drawings in bitmap format. So when I decided to rid my hard drive of some old BMPs (yes, they were MS Paint drawings) and archive them on CD, I decided to convert them to PNGs, as PNG's lossless compression would reduce each file to a mere percentage of its former size in bytes while retaining all of the original image quality. But doing that in a program such as Photoshop wasn't enough. Although it's a good program, Photoshop is notorious for its poor PNG compression. I needed another tool.

That's when I found out about PNGOUT, a command-line utility that reduces the file sizes of PNGs even further by getting rid of unnecessary data. It also converts files of other formats to equally slim PNGs. This helped me tremendously. However, it could only process one file at a time, and there was no easy way to give it a bunch of files to work on one at a time. To get around that, I had to mess with DOS-type things like batch files. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done, and rather nicely. I kept PNGOUT and still use it on every PNG file that I post on this site. Smaller files mean faster loading time for you and lower web hosting charges for me. Everyone wins.

Just today I found out about a new incarnation of PNGOUT: a shareware program for Windows called PNGOUTWin. The first thing you'd notice about this program is that it's a GUI version of PNGOUT, making it easier to use than before. But in addition to that, it allows for batch processing of files. On each line it shows the name of the file, the progress the program has made on it, the size of the original file, the size of the optimized file, the time it took to optimize the file, the change in bytes... you get the idea. There are more options as well. You can also choose between various levels of compression and even which chunks to keep. The program can put optimized images in a specific folder or in the same folder as the original image -- or you can have it overwrite the originals.

As I started the 30-day free trial of PNGOUTWin, I was eager to find out how good it was, but I was slightly annoyed because I hardly had any unoptimized PNG images for it to compress -- that's how much I rely on PNGOUT. So on a whim, I gave PNGOUTWin a file I had already compressed with PNGOUT, and it managed to trim a few bytes off that. It went from 54,004 bytes to 53,675. Then, just for giggles, I gave it a gigantic BMP -- a black-and-white (2 colors, not grayscale) scan of a drawing I once made. The original file was 26,355,716 bytes, or over 25 MB. The optimized version was only 143,482 bytes -- such a difference that, due to rounding, the program described it as 0% of the original size. It's actually 0.54% of the original size. Quite a difference indeed.

I recommend downloading the free trial. Even if you don't post GIF- or BMP-type graphics on the web, you still have nothing to lose (except a lot of space on your hard drive, which you can in turn use for other things). If you decide that you like it after 30 days, you can purchase the Personal Edition for $14.95 or the Corporate Edition for $29.95, but those are discounted prices that apparently won't last. If you're like me and you want to make every byte count, then PNGOUTWin is really worth it.

Just in time for Easter, it's Peep jousting!

A site that lets you browse at work: BrowseAtWork.com. However, if your work/school is smart, they've probably blocked that site, so I don't really see how it could be useful. Maybe it is if they don't know about it yet.

One year ago: "It would be about as pointless as books on tape."