![]() According to Beamr, the developer of JPEGmini, around 250 million image files each day are squashed via JPEGmini Server. JPEGmini Pro is aimed at professional photographers as well as websites that want to create images that will load as quickly as possible, something that’s increasingly important in an age of cellular communications. On smaller image files the savings are a little lower at a still very useful 30-50%. What does this mean in practice? On larger images it’s possible to reduce the file size by up to 80% or a factor of 5. In other words, JPEGmini analyses each image and then sacrifices unnecessary data points without harming the integrity of the image. JPEGmini does this by creating a single quantization matrix for an entire image so that it’s compliant with the baseline JPEG standard. You can grab the new test images here.This is where JPEGmini comes in: a new piece of software that offers to save image files in the JPEG baseline standard but with a much smaller footprint and no greater loss of image quality than regular JPEG compression. Because Google only allows a max photo size of 16 megapixels and the original test image was 24 MP, I downloaded the RAW format shot and resized it down to 16 MP in Photoshop before starting the test. This time around, I used a studio test image taken by a Nikon D750 DSLR ($ 2000 camera) taken from DPReview. ![]() The original image was just a photo taken on an 2014 Moto X. Next, I redid the comparison with a slightly better image. No pain no gain, I guess, but even so, I think it exhibits remarkably little degradation consider it is nearly a 100% improvement over either Google or JPEGmini’s algorithms alone. The biggest jump in image quality degradation is from applying JPEGmini to an already Google-compressed image. JPEGmini’s compression is good, too, eeking out an extra 40% compression over Google’s while still causing relatively little damage to the original photo. The original, uncompressed image was only very slightly altered by Google’s method, and yet it still was able to nearly cut the filesize in half. What should be immediately clear is that Google’s compression algorithm was the least degrading by a long shot. Of course, the double-compressed image has the most notable degradation of image quality, but even so, it is so minor that, I think, it is still almost certainly unnoticeable in large photographs.įinally, for a more rigorous analysis of the actual differences between each of the four test cases (original, Google, JPEGmini, Google+JPEGmini), I loaded them up in Photoshop and used the difference layer effect to calculate the actual changes in the original image that the compression algorithms performed. Most remarkable of all, though, is that by combining the two–Google and then JPEGmini–it doubled the compression even of the already-compressed image! On the other hand, JPEGmini manages to eek out an extra 40% compression with only trivial image degradation. The reduction in image quality is almost imperceptible, yet it manages to nearly cut the file size in half. In my personal opinion, all four images have the same perceptual image quality. So I a did a little test with a bright image to compare JPEGmini’s compression with Google’s compression. If you analyze the uncompressed and compressed images with a computer, you can see differences - but by eye, they look identical. Like JPEGmini, Google claims to be able to apply lossy compression to images without changing the perceptual quality of the image. The unlimited part comes with a caveat: Google will apply lossy compression to your files. As far as I can tell, its claims are pretty accurate, and it has literally helped me cut the size of some of my picture folders in half.Īs I’m sure most of you are aware, Google just unveiled Google Photos, and with it announced unlimited storage space for photos and videos. Its compression of JPEGs is lossy, but it claims to do so leaving the perceptual image quality virtually unchanged. I’ve been using a program called JPEGmini for a couple years now to compress my JPEG images. In this article I will take a look at Google Photos’ new photo compression performance.
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