Photos and images on a Mac with a Retina display are a thing of beauty. Sometimes they are a weighty thing of beauty because photos and images are fat and take up too much space, especially when shared, or posted online.
What Mac users have done for a few decades is to reduce the size of photos and images by a technique known as compression. Basically, compressing a file reduces the image size substantially, but the photo still looks about the same. That’s what Compress does.
Squeeze Easy
Think of file compression as a mathematical way to squeeze the air out of an image or photo; not so much that it looks different, but enough that the file size is manageable. Compress is something of a newcomer to a crowded field of file compression tools so it isn’t blazing any new ground except in ease of use.
If you can drag and drop you can use Compress to compress JPG, PNG, and even PSD files yet preserve visual quality.
What’s not to like?
Compress squeezes the air from PNG, JPG, and PSD files (converted to JPG). It works in batch mode, too, so grab a bunch of images or photos, stuff them into a folder, drag and drop and click. JPG files have a hand slider to adjust quality which also reduces or increases file size as needed.
Add a custom name extension, save files to a specific location, adjust PNG compression with a click, or switch to a dark user interface.
As file compression utilities go, Compress is priced about right, but could use a few additional features. No GIF? Photoshop layers would be useful. I tested Compress against my favorite compression application– Adobe’s soon-to-be-defunct Fireworks— and while it could make images as small, the quality was a bit less.
Otherwise, for a standalone compression tool it doesn’t get much easier or faster.
