5 ms·

TinyPNG launches API to automate PNG compression

55 points by molf 13y ago

tmikaeld 13y ago
As other mentioned already, a free open source alternative would be pngquant. Here is a free open source app for OS X that uses it. http://pngmini.com/ http://pngmini.com/
- masklinn 13y ago
  Works nicely when combined with "classical" PNG optimizers (PNGOut, Pngcrush, AdvPNG). And the same author has a frontend for these (ImageOptim)
gdc 13y ago
We're trying to determine if this is a joke. Is this something that is real?
- coin 13y ago
  Why wouldn't it be real?
_sabe_ 13y ago
This is perverted.
nyar 13y ago
I use Pngyu ( http://nukesaq88.github.io/Pngyu/ http://nukesaq88.github.io/Pngyu/) and it gives me the same compression as tinypng.
thangalin 13y ago
Assuming someone has installed curl and is running from the command line, what advantages does this service have over optipng or pngcrush?
- molf 13y ago
  TinyPNG combines lossy and lossless compression algorithms. Optipng and pngcrush are lossless only. The difference in file size can be huge.
  - cuu508 13y ago
    ok, what about pngquant? Seems to be doing about the same thing. I've been using it in batch scripts for processing hundreds of PNGs, repeatedly, with good results. http://pngquant.org/ http://pngquant.org/
    - molf 13y ago
      Yes, pngquant is awesome. TinyPNG uses it internally and combines it with other, lossless optimizations. We built TinyPNG for ease of use (no configuration, no settings to mess around with) and to reach a wider audience. Definitely use the tools you're most comfortable with!
    - RexRollman 13y ago
      PNGout is a pretty decent program. I install it when running Windows.
  - artursapek 13y ago
    Why don't you just open-source this?
    - ars 13y ago
      Because they don't want to? It's really nice when people open source things, but people don't have to do so, especially if they hope to make a little money off it.
      - forgottenpass 13y ago
        But what's the harm in asking? That comment (at the time of this post) is greyed out. So for some reason people are downvoting him for asking.
sturgill 13y ago
I'm a pretty big fan of TinyPNG. I was actually part of their beta invite for the API and wrote up a quick Ruby gem(1) to automate the process (and to auto-shrink PNGs on a Capistrano deploy). I haven't really messed around with it much since then, but it was fun to write and the team at TinyPNG was very accommodating. Not sure what I think about their pricing structure, but I wish them the best. 1) https://rubygems.org/gems/tiny_png https://rubygems.org/gems/tiny_png
kken 13y ago
Is this a viable business idea? E.g. providing a service online that requires a limited amount of processing time and could be packaged in a fairly small program when provided for offline processing? To the vendor this obviously provides more control. But is it worth it for the client? Personally, I'd be very reluctant to transfer anything that could be done locally by a small command line tool online.
- molf 13y ago
  I'm one of the creators and I can tell you we don't know either. We're a web development agency and this is a side project that got more popular than we imagined. After we launched we got a massive amount of requests for licenses or API subscriptions, so we decided to give it a go and see if we can at least cover the costs.
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    I have to admit this one is a bit of a head scratcher, but I get why it works at least for now. You've essentially built a SaaS bug fix for a shrink wrap product, which.. yeah.
    - sturgill 13y ago
      Back when I was slicing and dicing specs that had to be compatible with IE6, I really wish I could have used TinyPNG. Preserves alpha transparency that works in really crappy browsers, without resulting to weird CSS filter shenanigans. But even today, I really enjoy the service. Not sure what I would pay for it, but it is very convenient.
  - kken 13y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for replying. So I guess it is mainly a question of convenience right now.
- pwg 13y ago
  > E.g. providing a service online that requires a limited amount of processing time and could be packaged in a fairly small program when provided for offline processing? You mean something like optipng: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ or pngcrush: http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
Vektorweg 13y ago
Nice idea. But maybe you should do this with webp.
ginko 13y ago
Something like this should just be released as an open source lib.
- 9oliYQjP 13y ago
  Isn't TinyPNG a web GUI around pngquant command line utility?
  - masklinn 13y ago
    Probably some AdvPNG &al as well, on top of pngquant.
- sukuriant 13y ago
  Why? It's the developer's choice to sell it or give it away for free. They wrote something, they noticed a lot of uptake and now want to see if they can monetize this. I don't see a problem here.
  - _sabe_ 13y ago
    http://devnull-as-a-service.com/home/ http://devnull-as-a-service.com/home/
chromaton 13y ago
My favorite technique for optimizing PNG files comes from Wikipedia's page on preparing images to be used in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Preparing_images_for_upload#PNG_tips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Preparing_images_for_...
jheriko 13y ago
has anyone tested this and compared it with other tools? i seem to have a lot of free tools that do a very good job of this... especially when i add some thought to it. my own tests are basically inconclusive - its does the same job as my choice of tools up-to the point of being clever with colour depth and accepting a little loss, or things like knowing its a normal map so the blue channel can be binned... /me waits for key to test thoroughly hmm. looks like it is actually lossy. :/
onli 13y ago
I think I like that. Normally, I compress my pngs with gimp (by indexing them). That works fine, and as I do most of my screenshots as well with it, it is not too cumbersome. But it's not perfect either. The results of tinypng are a bit better. In my tests the images are almost the same size, text becomes equally blurry, but the gradients are a bit better preserved and the colors less distorted. With the Api, i can build a small tool which compresses the image for me without having to start gimp. Like (beware, crappy code): #!/bin/bash API_KEY="" wget -O "${1/.png/_tiny.png}" $(curl --user api:$API_KEY --data-binary @"$1" https://api.tinypng.com/shrink | JSON.sh | egrep '\["output","url"\]' | sed -e 's# [.*\]\t*##' -e 's#"##g') I won't become a paying customer though, 500 is perfectly fine for me, and I still have gimp. But I can imagine professional CMS-systems (or wordpress setups) including this in their workflow to automatically compress the .pngs inserted by their authors, instead of having to find the best compression method on their own (and rely on the server setup). PS: If that assumption turns out to be true, it could be worthwhile to build a wordpress plugin using the API to try to push that.
- molf 13y ago
  You're correct, some people that have been approaching us had several thousands of images to compress monthly from their web shop or CMS system. We're offering the free plan for people (perhaps like you) that just want to convert a couple of images whenever they deploy a site or build an app.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
drakaal 13y ago
I can't think of where you would use this. What platform is missing this functionality but has a URLFetch/Curl/FOpen to use the API? I would also think that if it was viable as a business someone would undercut you quickly. I suspect that a free Google App Engine account would give the API's to do this for a LOT of users at no cost to the host... Looks like I could roll it on GAE and handle about 70k images a day on a free instance or 2M a month on the free instance...

55 points by molf 13y ago

As other mentioned already, a free open source alternative would be pngquant. Here is a free open source app for OS X that uses it. http://pngmini.com/ http://pngmini.com/

masklinn 13y ago
Works nicely when combined with "classical" PNG optimizers (PNGOut, Pngcrush, AdvPNG). And the same author has a frontend for these (ImageOptim)

gdc 13y ago

We're trying to determine if this is a joke. Is this something that is real?

coin 13y ago
Why wouldn't it be real?

_sabe_ 13y ago

This is perverted.

nyar 13y ago

I use Pngyu ( http://nukesaq88.github.io/Pngyu/ http://nukesaq88.github.io/Pngyu/) and it gives me the same compression as tinypng.

thangalin 13y ago

Assuming someone has installed curl and is running from the command line, what advantages does this service have over optipng or pngcrush?

molf 13y ago
TinyPNG combines lossy and lossless compression algorithms. Optipng and pngcrush are lossless only. The difference in file size can be huge.
- cuu508 13y ago
  ok, what about pngquant? Seems to be doing about the same thing. I've been using it in batch scripts for processing hundreds of PNGs, repeatedly, with good results. http://pngquant.org/ http://pngquant.org/
  - molf 13y ago
    Yes, pngquant is awesome. TinyPNG uses it internally and combines it with other, lossless optimizations. We built TinyPNG for ease of use (no configuration, no settings to mess around with) and to reach a wider audience. Definitely use the tools you're most comfortable with!
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    PNGout is a pretty decent program. I install it when running Windows.
- artursapek 13y ago
  Why don't you just open-source this?
  - ars 13y ago
    Because they don't want to? It's really nice when people open source things, but people don't have to do so, especially if they hope to make a little money off it.
    - forgottenpass 13y ago
      But what's the harm in asking? That comment (at the time of this post) is greyed out. So for some reason people are downvoting him for asking.

sturgill 13y ago

I'm a pretty big fan of TinyPNG. I was actually part of their beta invite for the API and wrote up a quick Ruby gem(1) to automate the process (and to auto-shrink PNGs on a Capistrano deploy). I haven't really messed around with it much since then, but it was fun to write and the team at TinyPNG was very accommodating. Not sure what I think about their pricing structure, but I wish them the best. 1) https://rubygems.org/gems/tiny_png https://rubygems.org/gems/tiny_png

kken 13y ago

Is this a viable business idea? E.g. providing a service online that requires a limited amount of processing time and could be packaged in a fairly small program when provided for offline processing? To the vendor this obviously provides more control. But is it worth it for the client? Personally, I'd be very reluctant to transfer anything that could be done locally by a small command line tool online.

molf 13y ago
I'm one of the creators and I can tell you we don't know either. We're a web development agency and this is a side project that got more popular than we imagined. After we launched we got a massive amount of requests for licenses or API subscriptions, so we decided to give it a go and see if we can at least cover the costs.
- cbsmith 13y ago
  I have to admit this one is a bit of a head scratcher, but I get why it works at least for now. You've essentially built a SaaS bug fix for a shrink wrap product, which.. yeah.
  - sturgill 13y ago
    Back when I was slicing and dicing specs that had to be compatible with IE6, I really wish I could have used TinyPNG. Preserves alpha transparency that works in really crappy browsers, without resulting to weird CSS filter shenanigans. But even today, I really enjoy the service. Not sure what I would pay for it, but it is very convenient.
- kken 13y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for replying. So I guess it is mainly a question of convenience right now.
pwg 13y ago
> E.g. providing a service online that requires a limited amount of processing time and could be packaged in a fairly small program when provided for offline processing? You mean something like optipng: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ or pngcrush: http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

Vektorweg 13y ago

Nice idea. But maybe you should do this with webp.

ginko 13y ago

Something like this should just be released as an open source lib.

9oliYQjP 13y ago
Isn't TinyPNG a web GUI around pngquant command line utility?
- masklinn 13y ago
  Probably some AdvPNG &al as well, on top of pngquant.
sukuriant 13y ago
Why? It's the developer's choice to sell it or give it away for free. They wrote something, they noticed a lot of uptake and now want to see if they can monetize this. I don't see a problem here.
- _sabe_ 13y ago
  http://devnull-as-a-service.com/home/ http://devnull-as-a-service.com/home/

chromaton 13y ago

My favorite technique for optimizing PNG files comes from Wikipedia's page on preparing images to be used in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Preparing_images_for_upload#PNG_tips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Preparing_images_for_...

jheriko 13y ago

has anyone tested this and compared it with other tools? i seem to have a lot of free tools that do a very good job of this... especially when i add some thought to it. my own tests are basically inconclusive - its does the same job as my choice of tools up-to the point of being clever with colour depth and accepting a little loss, or things like knowing its a normal map so the blue channel can be binned... /me waits for key to test thoroughly hmm. looks like it is actually lossy. :/

onli 13y ago

I think I like that. Normally, I compress my pngs with gimp (by indexing them). That works fine, and as I do most of my screenshots as well with it, it is not too cumbersome. But it's not perfect either. The results of tinypng are a bit better. In my tests the images are almost the same size, text becomes equally blurry, but the gradients are a bit better preserved and the colors less distorted. With the Api, i can build a small tool which compresses the image for me without having to start gimp. Like (beware, crappy code): #!/bin/bash API_KEY="" wget -O "${1/.png/_tiny.png}" $(curl --user api:$API_KEY --data-binary @"$1" https://api.tinypng.com/shrink | JSON.sh | egrep '\["output","url"\]' | sed -e 's# [.*\]\t*##' -e 's#"##g') I won't become a paying customer though, 500 is perfectly fine for me, and I still have gimp. But I can imagine professional CMS-systems (or wordpress setups) including this in their workflow to automatically compress the .pngs inserted by their authors, instead of having to find the best compression method on their own (and rely on the server setup). PS: If that assumption turns out to be true, it could be worthwhile to build a wordpress plugin using the API to try to push that.

molf 13y ago
You're correct, some people that have been approaching us had several thousands of images to compress monthly from their web shop or CMS system. We're offering the free plan for people (perhaps like you) that just want to convert a couple of images whenever they deploy a site or build an app.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

drakaal 13y ago

I can't think of where you would use this. What platform is missing this functionality but has a URLFetch/Curl/FOpen to use the API? I would also think that if it was viable as a business someone would undercut you quickly. I suspect that a free Google App Engine account would give the API's to do this for a LOT of users at no cost to the host... Looks like I could roll it on GAE and handle about 70k images a day on a free instance or 2M a month on the free instance...