compression Archives

15 Best Free and Open Source Command-Line Image Compression Tools

This article recommends the best command-line image compression tools. They are all free and open source.

To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 18 of the best free compression tools.

crabz is a fast, compression and decompression tool. crabz is just a wrapper for the gzp library.

This roundup focuses on lossless compression tools which use multiple cores. Only free and open source software is included here.

ncompress is a fast, simple LZW file compressor. This software is in the public domain. It’s written in the C programming language.

p7zip-zstd is a p7zip fork with additional codecs and improvements. It’s written in the C and C++ programming languages.

XZ Utils is open source general-purpose data compression software with high compression ratio.

Plzip is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) lossless data compressor based on the lzlib compression library.

lbzip2 integrates well with tar. Even on single-core computers, lbzip2 can speed up archiving in combination with tar.

Long Range Zip (Lrzip) is a compression program that can achieve very high compression ratios and speed when used with large files.

BZip3 bills itself as a “better, faster and stronger spiritual successor to BZip2”.

PBZIP2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines.

bzip2 is a high-quality data compressor. This utility typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques.

gzip provides the standard GNU file compression utilities, which are also the default compression tools for Debian.

pixz is a parallel, indexed xz compressor. pixz produces a collection of smaller blocks which makes random access to the original data possible.