JPEGmini Lite App Reviews

There is a 20 file limit per day with the lite version (yes, it’s in the description). I did some digging on the developer’s web page to find what the difference is between JPEGMiniLite, JPEGMini, & JPEGPro. For what this app does it is under-featured and the other two versions are way overpriced. First, please let me clearly point out that if you want something super simple where you don’t have to use your brain and think AND you will only compress 20 or less images per day, this is the right app for you. How would this apply? Pictures taken with a smartphone or most consumer point-and-shoot cameras are JPEGs. These images will typically be from 1.5-5.0MB. You can expect close to a 60% size reduction on average, without much visual change. This is by using the vanilla settings with compressing and saving a new file and then not reducing any file size. This is great if you use DropBox, Box, Google+, iCloud, etc…. for your photos. You can compress them all and then you will save some space. It will do what it says, but I hope you take less than 20 photos per day. Everything I am about to explain is not because I’m dissatisfied. It’s for your benefit. If the developer wants to implement more improvements and reduce the price to what it should be, it might be worth using. Until then, let me save you some money and some time. If you are looking for some manual control over compression settings, it doesn’t exist, at least not here and not that I recalled on the pro version. The developer gives you the following options, and only the following options: Compress image and save as new file. Compress image and overwrite original file. In addition, you can select to reduce the pixel dimensions to small, medium, or large. The last set of options gives you the ability to set the maximum width or height. I presume that there is some aspect ratio scaling here but the developer did not specify this. This would be great if you’re designing an App or a webpage and you need a specific height or width, except most develpers already use an editor that can do all of this stuff so they wouldn’t need pro, other than maybe batch conversion, which could be automated with commandline anyway. I have several tools. This time around, I used Pixelmator and I pitted it against JPEG mini. I used copies of the same 1.5MB file that I compressed with both applications. JPEGMini produced a compressed file at 520KB and Pixelmator produced a 360KB file. The starting and ending pixel dimensions were 1836x3264 (standard iPhone 5 photo). Without getting into tedious details, the quality was the same. I have 20/vision and I had to magnify the image before I could see a difference between the two. Wit Pixelmator, I had fine-grain control over compression quality. JPEGMini didn’t offer this. The paid version just removes the 20 file per-day limit, in a nutshell. You might say that JPEGMini can reduce file size and then compress, leaving a smaller file. Yes, but I can and did do this with Pixelmator and it kicked the pants off of JPEGMini. Why does this matter? If you upgrade to JPEGMini it’s $20 and if you buy Pixelmator it’s about $30. Basically for an extra $10 dollars, you’re getting a photo editor that can go toe-to-toe with photoshop. JPEG mini will let you compress JPEG files. Pixelmator will let you compress JPEG files and if needed, convert to 9 other formats, including several lossy that you can select the quality. Moreover, there is another piece of software that is intuitive to use, works exactly the same, and it’s free. Not only is the software free, it also works on both JPEG and PNG files right out of the box where as JPEGMini is a JPEG only solution. DO NOT look for imageOptim in the App store. Someone basically re-skinned it and is selling it. The original developer has been trying to get it removed for months. The original version is free, the App Store version is not. Go to the Web. If you use decide to use ImageOptim, be certain to work from a copy because it will overwrite the image with compression. You can also get another tool from them that will help to reduce transparent images file sizes, called ImageAlpha. Oh, for those of you that wanted to know, ImageOptim created an identical quality file to JPEGMini at 406KB. That’s about 115KB smaller and it was fast. Drag the image into the window, *Poof!* new smaller file for free, no limits. So I said that JPEGMini doesn’t give us a lot of control… Most of these programs all use the exact same libraries and algorithms to compress images, usually stemming from free source code. When you open the preferences to ImageOptim, you’ll see there are tons more options for you to manipulate than what JPEGMini provides. Again, it’s free! You can do the same things and more, so why pay for less? If you want something quick and easy without thinking, This will get you close enough. If you are actually going to pay to update this software, stop and get ImageOptim. Seriously, stop, just get ImageOptim. If you have to buy something, think hard about just getting Pixelmator for the Mac because you can do more with it. It’s like going into a car dealership and asking for a car and findout out that for $10 more you can have the delux model. Dev, please forgive me, but for the price you are asking for the paid versions, you want far too much. There are more effective apps at a better price and with more options. As for JPEGMiniLite being free, ImageOptim does more and it’s free too. You litterally just drag and drop without needing to click anything. Again, there are no limits with the other two options. Pretty looking app, but you’re price gouging.

I’m a Web developer/designer; this tool has enabled me to use great quality photos without the overhead. Simple, effective and saves me a ton of time trying to manually optimize, plus the images look great - all the time. I highly recommend. I had been using PNGs along with other compression utilities for some time, but JPEGMini has shifted my Web file format of choice back to JPG - especially for large files. Image quality is so good, I even use it on my personal photo archive to reduce space. Wish I’d found this sooner.

Works as advertised. No ill effects on image,

This app does an awesome job of reducing file sizes on web-safe .jpg files without any visible loss in quality. Superb for meeting low weight banner/ad sizes, as well as increasing load time for website images. Free version has limited number of images per day, but well worth the full version price!!

A great app for photographers. i needed an app that could reduce the size of my photos because they were taking unnecessary spaces on my hard disk. Now i can lower down the size of my photos very easily. thanks for making such an app.

I am a new Mac user but I could not get the drag and drop feature to work. After I choose the photos manually, the software said it would over write the old versions. I could not see a change in size. It said that it reduced the size by 1.5 time. That’s not much. I then tried the oprion where you specify the new width and height. That did not work. It did not put new photos in the destination folder. I see no reason to pay for the full version if that’s all I can get out of it.

I love this app and use it all the time. My one complaint is that it would be nice to be able to specify both the width and the height for resized photos. I’ve found that one layout (horizontal pics, maybe?) has a significantly higher file size than the other (vertical?). The app is simple and easy to use, but if there were a “if the photo is wider, max width should be X” setting, it’d be perfect.

If youre not using this app its just because you dont know what you dont know, easily manage the size of your JPEG images, everything from a very tiny size that would be good for sending proofs by email to larger but still reduced file size with no quality loss. I know a lot of you say that hard drive space is cheap and thats true but what about things like dropping small file size pictures on your website with no quality loss that allows your site to load much faster even on old outdated computers. Just try the free version also look at a couple of the YouTube videos that other people have made thats what convinced me Best $20 ever spent. I dont know what theyre Pro version does but after trying this Im going to check it out the pro version is $149 and the top version is about $200 cant see how they would be that much better but then I didnt pay much attention to this app for quite a while even though it was on my computer, like the old saying need is the creator of invention, I had the need to reduce the file size of a lot of JPEG images so I thought I would check this out was pleasantly surprised how easy it was. Just buy it youll be glad you did PS I usually rate new software pretty hard but like another old saying this is the exception to the rule its great.

I’ve used this app for only a minute, and immediately jumped to PRO. If you have a DSLR, and send a lot of photos via email, you definitely need this app. Waiting for the Photos update now.

You guys rock! This is an incredible application. The quality of the images doesn’t go down at all. Valuable space saver I use every day!

Perfect tool for my Photos! Now it can support my DSLR and iPhone panoramas resolutions. This is the number one software for Photographers.

I was using this ragularly and it was great. After the last update the photos have beome very pixelated with lots of artifacts. they are now unusable. luckely I did it to copies. Until they fix this problem I can no longer use the app

JPEGmini has turned to become one of my favorite tools and was integrated into my photo editing workflow. The images look identical while the file size is smaller. The simplicity of just dreagging and dropping the files into the interface is my favorite part. This is a must have tool for everyone who cares about his images, but want to make them fast to move around or doesn’t want bloated hard drives.

JPEGmini - it just works! Ive run numerous tests with high definition jpegs (>28 Mb) which came out as 6-8MB jpegs. There is absolutely no visible difference. Love it.

I use this all the time to quickly shrink images for a blog but it won’t resize them unless you choose a new folder and you can’t specify the size you have to pick from the ones they have. You also can’t drag items onto the icon, you have to open it first. Some kind of context menu list item in the Finder and/or a toolbar widget would be nice too.

Love this app. It does what is expected in the best way. Hight quality and reliability. Simple to use, saves tons of space and time. Most important - amazing quality.