I am currently working on a project that has lot’s of rather large PNG files (2048×2048 Pixels) and have been thinking of ways to help compress some of the data to a much more manageable size (currently about 80mb of data). After a brief search on the web, I can across OptiPNG (Homepage: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ )

OptiPNG basically takes the image, and runs a whole series of tests on it to try and compress the data inside of it as much as possible, without affecting the overall appearance of the image. It has a lot of neat tricks up its sleeve, and will even try a range of compression options to find the best one that suits your image, including scaling to 8-bit palettes and more. The tool is command-line and runs fine in a Vista shell window.

After running the tool on 6 of my images, I have already saved about 600Kb of disk space, which is great 🙂 I thought I was doing well before, but now I have saved a little more, I am very happy. Definately reccomend the tool to anyone who uses PNG files on the web and needs to crush them down in size.