JPEGmini: Images on a diet!

Google has come up with a new image platform called ‘WebP’, which reduces an image’s size by around 35%. But, someone just shot it in the head. Curious?

JPEGmini is an online service that enables you to reduce the size of your JPEG files. According to their website, JPEGmini can reduce a JPEG’s size by up to 5 times without changing the file format — and from the testing that we have been doing for the past hour or so, the claim is perfectly valid. To add to your surprise further, JPEGmini does not reduce the perceptible quality or the resolution of the image. Imagine the possibilities for a second, websites carrying images ‘compressed’ with JPEGmini will load much faster, you will be able to store many more images in your computer and and if you’re the owner of a website you can save on monthly bandwidth. Will somebody please tell me that is not a dream?

You shouldn’t be expecting magical performance for smaller images, though. JPEGmini performs best on images that have bigger resolutions. 8MP or higher, to be more precise.

Opinion: Google launched their own image format, WebP, a few months ago and claimed that their new format helps reduce image sizes by 30-40%. But, WebP has not been able to earn mainstream success. Mozilla, recently, announced that they will not be supporting Google’s WebP. All in all, despite the arrival of new image formats, JPEG is still the most popular one. It has become a standard, you can say. This is what makes it very difficult for completely new image formats like WebP and JPEG 2000 to succeed. So, the ultimate solution is the improvement of the JPEG itself and JPEGmini does just that. What the community thinks of it is yet to seen but, it is inevitable, we believe, that this start-up will be bought by some technology giant in the near future.

What do you think about JPEGmini? How was your experience with the service? Want to answer these questions, leave a comment below.