Not Special

As a graphic artist and web designer, in a world where image compression is central to my job, I was pretty excited about this program when I heard about it. After downloading and experimenting with this program, and creating some compressed JPEG images which I could compare to compressed versions I created in other programs like Adobe Photoshop, I can definitely say it *does not* preserve any special amount of the original JPEG image quality. And more than this, the compression is quite aggressive.

If youre viewing a zoomed out version of a high resolution photograph this might not make much of a difference (though youll definitely lose crisp details, such as those in someones hair), and youre also going to lose out on quality when viewing a photograph on a medium which takes advantage of a higher resolution (whether on a high-desnsity screen such as that on the new iPad or Retina MacBook Pros). I wouldnt dream of feeding my photo collection through this application unless I was deseparate for storage—and storage is not expensive. It is definitely useless for any sort of professional application.

Although I will be deleting this program, Im still giving it at least one star because it provides a very easy compression system for JPEG graphics to people who cant afford more expensive programs, or dont know how to take proper advantage of them. And although I wouldnt recommend to them that they use this program on any photograhps which mean a great deal to them (plan for the future—even if the results are acceptable now, who knows what you will think five years, or ten years down the road, when the storage saved is meaningless) it can serve some basic purposes, such as in sharing photo collections with someone to view through a medium, like email, where sending limits can easily limit an email to a few relatively uncomrpessed photographs.

Edit: Also, another reviewer suggested that the full version (in my opinion overpriced at $20) would add the ability to save JPEG images with no loss in quality. I see absolutely no clear language to suggest that this would be the case, nor, having seen what this program can do, do I believe that it would be technically feasible anyway (especially no loss with this sort of file size decrease—technically impossible).

James & Jenny about JPEGmini Lite