Looking for a lossles compression api similar to smushit

Question

Anyone know of an lossless image compression api/service similar to smushit from yahoo?

Cheers

Answer 1

From their own FAQ:

WHAT TOOLS DOES SMUSH.IT USE TO SMUSH IMAGES?

We have found many good tools for reducing image size. Often times these tools are specific to particular image formats and work much better in certain circumstances than others. To "smush" really means to try many different image reduction algorithms and figure out which one gives the best result.

These are the algorithms currently in use:

1. ImageMagick: to identify the image type and to convert GIF files to PNG files.
2. pngcrush: to strip unneeded chunks from PNGs. We are also experimenting with other PNG reduction tools such as pngout, optipng, pngrewrite. Hopefully these tools will provide improved optimization of PNG files.
3. jpegtran: to strip all metadata from JPEGs (currently disabled) and try progressive JPEGs.
4. gifsicle: to optimize GIF animations by stripping repeating pixels in different frames.

More information about the smushing process is available at the Optimize Images section of Best Practices for High Performance Web pages.

It mentions several good tools. By the way, the very same FAQ mentions that Yahoo will make Smush.It a public API sooner or later so that you can run at it your own. Until then you can just upload images separately for Smush.It here.

Answer 2

See this:

http://github.com/thebeansgroup/smush.py

It's a Python implementation of smushit that can be run off-line to optimise your images without uploading them to Yahoo's service.