Manage your Photos: JPEG Photo Compression

Last Updated on July 22, 2020

Summary

All three tools are CLI based. Why do we advocate CLI tools so strongly? It’s partly because of the availability of batch processing. For example, let’s say your photo collection is stored in ~/Photos/ with many sub-directories. You can process all the images with a single shell command ran from the Photos directory.

$ find . -name "*.jpg" -exec bash -c 'file="{}"; guetzli --quality 84 "$file" "${file/%ext/out}"' \;

The example command uses Guetzli, but you can easily adapt it for the other tools.

Guetzli

Guetzli offers excellent compression and excellent quality output but makes a huge sacrifice in terms of encoding time. Even if you have a powerful PC with lots of cores, you’ll need copious amounts of RAM to encode multiple images simultaneously.

Guetzli doesn’t support progressive image loading (where images load from blurry to sharp, instead of top to bottom) and only supports sRGB.

There is a third-party GUI available for Guetzli which uses Qt, but this has few followers.

Website: https://github.com/google/guetzli
Support: Qt based GUI
Developer: Google
License: Apache License 2.0

MozJPEG

MozJPEG is our recommended JPEG encoder. Like Guetzli it offers perfect backward compatibility with JPEG files, offers excellent compression ratios without taking a year and a day to compress files. It strikes a perfect balance.

Website: github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg
Support:
Developer: Mozilla
License: IJG (Independent JPEG Group) License, Modified (3-clause) BSD License, zlib License

Lepton

Lepton is a fully streamable format, meaning the decompression can be applied to any file as that file is being transferred over the network. It provides lossless, bit-exact storage for any type of photo, for archival purposes or for serving live.

Lepton is excellent at compressing large images. It offers good compression ratios together with blindingly fast encoding. But you cannot view images without the software which can be inconvenient. But if you insist on lossless compression, it’s the best JPEG tool available.

Website: github.com/dropbox/lepton
Support: Blog
Developer: Dropbox
License: Apache License 2.0

There are other good open source JPEG encoders including libjpeg, libjpeg-turbo, and jpegoptim.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – Guetzli – Compression chart
Page 3 – Guetzli – Time chart
Page 4 – MozJPEG – Compression chart
Page 5 – MozJPEG – Time chart
Page 6 – Lepton – Compression chart
Page 7 – Lepton – Time chart
Page 8 – Summary

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