Save your Money. Better alternative free or paid.

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.

Danieljh75 about JPEGmini Lite