Anyone here used JPEGmini?

http://www.jpegmini.co​m/windows

Apparently the app is now available for Windows. I'm not really sure how useful this app is. It might come in handy for the iPad for those that want to use the device to show off their pictures. Have anyone here used the software before? Is it any good?

Why pay $20 when FastStone can do the same, and loads more, for free?

Yes, FastStone rules!

...or www.xnview.com also free...

I followed the link in the OP and really wonder how they can work this trick. They seem to be claiming that they have the ability, while still conforming to the JPEG standards to be able to reduce file size by 80% without affecting the quality of the image at all. For the life of me I do not understand how they can do this, if you reduce the file size then you either have had to reduce the resolution of the image, or you have had to increase the compression ratio and discard more information from the image. Either way you are adversely going to affect the quality of the image, from the level it is already at.

I am aware that there would seem to be an optimum level of compression for JPEG files, where the difference between an uncompressed file (saved say as a TIFF) and the compressed file is virtually undetectable. Also that the there is no detectable visual improvement between this compression level and that of a maximum quality JPEG file. It would seem that from published testing* that this "ideal" level of JPEG compression is achieved in Adobe products at 80% in Lightroom, and at 10 out of 12 for Photoshop. Above these levels there is no perceptible increase in quality, while the file size grows rapidly. Under these quality levels the file size is only marginally reduced, but with a rapid decrease in image quality.

Given the above the only way it seems that you might be able to significantly reduce file sizes without adversely affecting quality using the JPEG standard is if you are starting with an uncompressed format, or that you have started with a maximum quality JPEG that has virtually no compression. If you are consistently saving your JPEG images at 100%/level 12 then simply by reducing that to 80%/level 10 will get you the same result for free. If you are already using the optimum quality level then you are not going to be able to re-compress your images to save 80% disk space without severly affecting the image quality.

*I am sorry but I cannot remember where I saw the report of this testing, it was from a link on another POTN thread of the same nature as this one.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #15932471
They seem to be claiming that they have the ability, while still conforming to the JPEG standards to be able to reduce file size by 80% without affecting the quality of the image at all.

Actually they are using that old marketing trick "reduce file size by up to 80%...". Of course if you are already saving your images at 80% / 10-12 quality settings there will be zero appreciable reduction.

So you guys are saying this app is junk and that there's nothing special about it?

lsquare wrote in post #15933671
So you guys are saying this app is junk and that there's nothing special about it?

Well assuming you are well informed and are not just blindly saving your JPEG images at the maximum quality setting. The thing with standards is that if you follow them they are well, standard. The testing that I refered to was actually very thorough. It specifically looked at Adobe products and produced somecinteresting results. If you save a JPEG file in PS you get a 13 step quality setting option(0-12). It also found that although LR has a % scale that can be set to an "accuracy" of 1% it also only has 13 different levels of compression. The 80% level gives the same output as 10 in PS but so do 6 other values. This indicates that although a different interface in the two programs dialogues they use the same processing underneath.

The Image quality/filesize ratio will be similar across all applications as it is effectivly goverened by the JPEG standard. If you are aware of this relationship then you can pick the setting that will give the combination has no detectable quality loss with the smallest file size. Increasing the quality level from this point the file size rapidly increases, with no percepterble increse in quality. In some instances the image file size was actually marginally larger than for the uncompressed TIFF file.when saved at 100%/12. When reducing the quality setting from the ideal then the file size reduction is actually very small while the reduction in quality is dramatic.

One other thing to remember that thanks to the way that JPEG compression works the reduction in filesize is also very dependent on the content of the file. Images with large amounts of very fine detail are hard to compress, but conversly are possibly less likely to show artifacting up. Imagesxwith very little detail but fine graduation changes can be very easy to compress but will show artifacts incredibly well. So if you save at the average of the best IQ/size ratio then you are going to be pretty close to optimum all of the time.

So no I would definatly not pay for this software. If you consistently save your images from adobe (and probably 99% of all other programs) at maximum quality then yes you could probably make those files considerebly smaller for no perceptable loss of quality. Do you need to pay for a program to do this for you, no, just do it in the program you originally used. Is it a rip off? Not sure. Is it value for money? Definatly not.

Alan

http://regex.info …room-goodies/jpeg-quality
Although the article is specifically about Lightroom, in the Comments section below there are several comparisons to PSCS.
http://regex.info …ies/export-quality-tester

lsquare wrote in post #15933671
So you guys are saying this app is junk and that there's nothing special about it?

No and yes, in that order.

I'm sure it does what it sets out to do very well. But what it sets out to do isn't difficult and is done perfectly well by hundreds of other apps, almost all of which also do a lot more and many of which are a lot cheaper.

An alternative for Raw shooters that offers considerable compression with very little loss is the new variation of the dng format, lossy dng. It can be a storage/archive format, but Adobe has also come up with a clever use of it to create the new Smart Previews in LR5 Beta: they are downsized lossy dngs with a fixed size of 2540 pixels on the long side no matter what the original Raw size. Thus they are very small (around 1 MB) but can be used as surrogates for the originals if they are offline and have the additional advantage of speeding up developing because they can be read faster.

agedbriar wrote in post #15931764
Yes, FastStone rules!

Yes, indeed it does. I just deinstalled xnview from my system

The following is an excerpt from the comments to Friedl's article which is a bit geeky but might contain a clue to how the OP application provides higher compression. I will just preface it by explaining that when an image is written as a jpg it is converted to a different space, one which separates the luminance data from the color data (YCrCb space, in which Y is luminance). This can allow different amounts of compression to be used for luminance and color. Here is the quote:

In a nutshell, Adobe products will use either a 4:4:4 subsampling (which is no subsampling at all, and thus full resolution) or 4:2:0 subsampling (both red and blue channels are reduced to one-quarter resolution before compression). There is no switch to specify the amount of subsampling to use. In Photoshop, the change from 4:2:0 to 4:4:4 happens between quality 6 and 7. In Photoshop’s Save For Web, it happens between quality 50 and 51. In Lightroom, you already noticed that something unexpected happens between 47-53 quality and 54-61 quality. Guess what levels those correspond to in Photoshop? 6 and 7… exactly as expected.

It may be that "Jpegmini" is using only 4:2:2 or even 4:1:1 subsampling throughout its range.
It may also be stripping out metadata to save space.

lsquare wrote in post #15933671
So you guys are saying this app is junk and that there's nothing special about it?

It's not junk. Its just that you can get the same thing for free, so why pay.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #15934115
It's not junk. Its just that you can get the same thing for free, so why pay.

Well, I wanted to ask just in case the company behind JPEGmini did indeed came up with some sort of revolutionary algorithm to take jpeg compression to the next level. I'm glad it's been cleared up that there is nothing special about this app.