Jennifer from Random Acts Of Photography told me about Jpegmini, which is a free online service for scrunching jpegs.
There are also two downloadable versions for Mac computers. These are a free ‘lite’ version that restricts use to 20 photos per day, and a full version that supports jpeg images as big as 28Mpx and allows unlimited scrunching.
I tried the online version with a full-size jpeg and it scrunched it from 7MB to 1.8MB with no discernable degradation of the image.
I can’t see that there’s a way to resize images.
With the full version of the downloadable app, you can batch process JPEGs.
The only question in my mind is how much the image is degraded on multiple saves compared to saving and re-saving the original jpeg. I might do a test to find out.
I resized this image for the web using Photoshop and then pushed the image through JPEGmini and it shaved about 7KB off the image.
Here it is:
And here is a side by side of a part of the original and the scrunched version viewed at 100%.
I think that JPEGmini has held all the detail and the highlight and shadow information.
Take a close look and let me know what you think.
In fact, can you tell which is which? I wouldn’t be able to.