Best program to shrink jpg size?

badabump

Actually photo shop is great for that. Just save it for the web, and choose the file size. 60% should do just fine.

yeah, photoshop is good for it

I am using photoshop for those type of works. Its working well for me. Try it.

Yeah, you can get some pretty sweet compression with the photoshop save for web option.

Photoshop is not that good at getting small file sizes - better than it used to be tho. Ulead's software is better and Arles has a bunch of different JPEG compression filters(?) that are better.

Thanks Mutt. Haven't used Arles in years, will have to check it out again.

DCE AutoEnhance. Best I've seen.

Try this one out, I was very impressed with its compression, its free too

Description:
FastStone Photo Resizer is a free image Converter/Resizer intended to enable users especially digital camera owners to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy BATCH mode. It supports major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF and PNG. Drag and Drop mouse operation is well supported.

http://www.download.com/FastStone-Ph...ml?tag=lst-0-1

i use photoshop, works for me

you might wanna try webgraphics optimizer professional from plenio software solutions
site: webopt.com

I use Paint Shop Pro 8 and it works fine. Check it at www.jasc.com

arles

try using a program called pixresizer

Arles is probably more than you need and it's compression is TERRIBLE.

Go grab IrfanView. http://www.irfanview.com/download_sites.htm and install. Set it to view your jpegs, gifs, jpgs and bmps as default. You'll love how easy this thing views images. You can scroll through them all within the folder with your scroll wheel and arrow keys. This program when used as a viewer is much quicker and easier to use than the stock windows preview tool.

Open the first image you want to shrink then go to 'file' then 'batch conversion/rename'

Once in there click 'options' beside the 'Output Format' menu item and chose 74 for quality and click 'ok'.

Now set your output directory to something that's easy to find each time you use it. I made a folder on my desktop called "Out" for this stuff.

next you will see buttons along the top left side. Click 'add all' then "start"

From now on all you have to do to shrink the images is open the first image, click "add all" then start. The whole process takes about 30 seconds on a batch of 100 large images.

If you need to resize any images click the 'use advanced option" checkmark and click "set advanced option" and select "set both sides to" and enter your max image length in both the width and length fields. These numbers should be the same. So with an example of you wanting all images to be no bigger than 800 pixels long all images will end up either 800x600 or 600x800 depending on the aspect ratio of the content given to you. Make sure "preserve aspect ration" , "use resample function" and "don't enlarge smaller pictures" are all checked.
Now click ok and then do the "add all" and "start" thing.

Any time you don't want it to resize on any given batch just uncheck "use advanced options"

Hope all of this is of any help to you. This is the ONLY application that's not hard on system resources and is simple to use and has very good compression. best of all. IT'S FREE!

fireworks: select batch process to compress a bunch of pics at once.

Thanks all so much for your inputs. Having checked out all programs mentioned in this thread I think Arles gives the best result. Now I'm off to bed

Hrm....

How about a php script that uses GD and/or ImageMagik ?

you find this easier than arles?

Photoshop sucks because it leaves a lot of metainformation in the file which artificially inflates filesizes. The best thing to use is Jasc Paintshop Pro. Do your thing with the pics in photoshop, then just open and resave them in jasc.. it strips the metainformation without comprimising image quality. It can drop a 100k pic to 50k or less sometimes.

Well, yeah I guess so.....

I use and love JPEG Optimizer from http://www.xat.com/ . It takes them way down in kb, but you don't lose quality or size