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Optimize png images with pngquant

·521 words·3 mins·🙈 ·
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Surfing on F-droid - an open-source app store - I discovered the Atomize app. This app aims to reduce the size of an image in png format, often by up to 70%.

In my case, using a few screenshots or manga scans, the reduction often reaches 50% with negligible (unnoticeable) losses in image quality.

I was amazed, so I opened the About app screen where I discovered that the app is simply a front-end of the open-source binary pngquant.

The majority of the images on this site have now been optimised with pngquant (as if Hugo optimisation wasn’t already enough) with resulting qualities ranging from 92 to 100%. 100% quality is unattainable because pngquant does lossy compression.

Downloading pngquant #

Downloading pngquant is very simple. In my case it was already present in the Arch repos, so just run pacman -S pngquant, otherwise for those using Windows or Mac-OS other download possibilities, even some GUIs are listed on the pngquant site.

Use pngquant from the command line #

``bash pngquant –skip-if-larger –speed 1 –ext .png –force -Q 92-100 $(find . -name ‘*.png’)


Update: this is better because it can use multiple cores, -P8 is the number of CPUs:
```bash
find . -name '*.png' -print0 | xargs -0 -P8 -L1 pngquant --ext .png --force -Q 92-100 --skip-if-larger

I have run this command to compress my images, obtaining good results, often reductions of more than 50% of the original size.

  • --skip-if-larger If the resulting file is larger than the original one, then it is not saved.

  • speed 1 the compression speed is a number between 1 and 11, 1 is the value that ensures a slow but effective compression, 11 on the other hand generates a fast but worse compression ratio, e.g. the resulting file will be larger. 4 is the default value of the speed parameter if not specified.

  • -Q 92-100 sets the minimum and maximum quality. If the quality is less than the minimum value - in my case 92 - the file is not saved. On the other hand, if the quality exceeds the maximum value, then fewer colours will be used to compress the file more effectively. This range is rather high, for a website even -Q 70-85 would suffice, as the priority is to reduce the file size, not the detail in the photos.

  • --ext .png --force This part overwrites the processed images (I use git, so it’s not a problem for me) if you want to avoid it, remove the –force suffix or change the extension (i.e. the file suffix) to e.g. --ext compressed.png.

  • $(find . -name '*.png') This code expression uses the find command. In this case, it finds all files ending in .png in the current folder (.) and subfolders, producing a list which is read by the pngquant command. Instead of using $(find . -name '*.png'), with *.png only the png files in the current directory are processed. If you want to convert a single file you just have to write the filename at the end of the command.

Sources: #

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