What are the best JPEG compression tools?

Question

When making a webpage every byte counts. Especially if the webpage is heavy on graphics, has large backgrounds, etc.

For that reason I want to find a good tool to compress my huge background files into as small JPEG files as possible, while still maintaining an acceptable quality.

I know that a lot of things depend on the compression algorithms used, and "80% quality" can differ from tool to tool. For example, there are several tools aimed at recompressing PNG files as best as possible. Unfortunately I cannot find any good tools for JPEGs with Google, because there just is too much "noise" in the search results.

Thus I turn to my fellow developers. What software do you know that maintains the best size/quality relation?

Answer 1

Photoshop and its "export for web" function always worked for me. Good compression and little to no quality loss.

Answer 2

I think every answer you will get will be subjective.

However, there is one thing you can do to reduce JPEGs without lossy compression, and that is to strip the metadata that almost every program and camera will add.

I like to use this utility to accomplish this.

http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=30

Answer 3

I have had good results with the Python Imaging Library.

Answer 4

The Google Page Speed extension to FireBug does lossless compression, and in their Best Practices, they recommend jpegtran and jpegoptim as external tools for that task.

Answer 5

You could try IranView - easy to use and it has powerful converting tool.

Answer 6

Adobe FireWorks lets you do selective compression where you can have for example someone's face at 90% quality and the rest of the image at a lower quality setting.

Also I like the size of FireWorks exported png files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks