As a journalist, photography is one of the most important skillsets we must possess, and everytime I transfer photos from my camera or smartphone to my laptop for post processing, the thing I always dread is the file size of each photo. For instance, an average photo file size of the iPhone X’s 12-megapixel camera is around 5MB, my Sony RX100 MK3’s 20-megapixel output averages at 10MB, they easily fill up my hard drive and taxes on our server bandwidth if I do not resize them to upload here. Many months ago, I was provided a review license of JPEGMini Pro, a software developed by imaging company Beamr, which comes with a patent-pending photo recompression technology that delivers up to 80% compression rate, and truth to be told, I was seriously impressed and sold on what it’s capable of.
How does JPEGMini achieve such a high compression rate? According to the company’s explanation, the technology behind this compression comprises of two components – an image quality detector and a unique JPEG encoder, which the former is used to determine the maximum compression rate without causing artifacts to the picture, the latter is then used to adapt the JPEG encoding process to the original photos to create a compact representation that is possible under the JPEG standard. Rather than calling it compression, this is a methodology called ‘recompression’, which processes the original photo and optimizing it’s file size at the same time, hence enabling up to 5x or 80% of compression rate on the original photo without compromising picture quality. Below is a comparison of a photo that was taken from my Sony RX100.
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In my tests, JPEGMini Pro managed to recompress the photo 68% smaller of it’s file size, and it takes less than 2 seconds to compress my 20-megapixel photo, while keeping most attributes of the photo intact.
Download the uncompressed photo here
Download the JPEGMini compressed photo here
While the average user won’t find the need for compressing their photos, JPEGMini will greatly help content creators and photographers if they don’t want to resize their photos to achieve a smaller file size. JPEGMini Pro is able to resize photo resolutions of up to 128-megapixel on the Mac, which if you appreciate the compression of JPEG, you are definitely going to need the help of JPEGMini to get your photography work easily sent over to a client and have faster loading speed when you upload your work to a website. Best of all, JPEGMini Pro comes with a Lightroom and Photoshop plugin, so if you ever post process your photos with them, you can take advantage of it to greatly reduce the size of your exports when using Lightroom and Photoshop.
The license of JPEGMini Pro will cost you US$99, which is pretty reasonable for what it is capable of, and considering that you can finally squeeze more JPEG files into a flash drive and cloud storage, there’s no better reason on not to consider this if you deal with photos everyday, available for Windows and Mac, you can download a free trial of the app over here. However, if you merely need a one time photo compression, the company does offer a free web tool that helps you do just that, which you can access it over here.
Big shoutout to JPEGMini for providing the license for this review!
