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Crunch — Insanely good PNG image optimization
Crunch is a free, open source macOS GUI application that is built on pngquant and zopflipng PNG image optimization. It uses a lossy approach to PNG image optimization. The tool is available through Homebrew as a native macOS application.
`$ brew cask install crunch`
Image examples + compression ratio analysis available on the Github repository README.
MIT license.
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Stefan Wrobel
Any reason to use this over ImageOptim?
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This looks handy @csimpkins 🙌
How would you explain how this compression works in layman's terms? 😅
@amrith In the simplest terms possible, this is a "lossy" approach to PNG optimization. That is important and the reason why the file sizes are smaller than approaches that use lossless PNG optimization. Lossy means that information that was in your original image file is lost. This is something that can decrease image quality. I spent a good deal of time optimizing the current approach across numerous images a couple of years ago and have used this tool in production settings since this application was originally released in 2016. My experience has been that across most image types that I use, the quality difference is imperceptible. There are situations where it is not the best tool for the job and I provided some examples on the repository README page to demonstrate this. They show how artifacts can be introduced into certain types of visual features within images. Clearly, this and all other lossy tools come with the caveat that you should not use them without human supervision in production settings. I can attest to the fact that I've used the tool across nearly every PNG image that I've pushed for public consumption over the last two years and don't recall a single instance of quality problems. Most of my images are simple illustration style images so this endorsement comes with that caveat.
Consider it another tool in your arsenal that provides easy access to a strong lossy approach to PNG file optimization. There will be situations where you find easy size gains for your files. In some cases, you need to drop back to lossless optimization if quality becomes an issue and there are other tools available for that.
Thanks for the question. Please let me know if this did not address it.
Someone else seems to have changed the tagline to "Insanely good PNG image optimization" from "Insane(ly slow but wicked good) PNG image optimization" as is used on the repository. If this was an admin, perhaps "Insane lossy PNG image optimization" would be a better tagline?
There was an issue with a couple of pngquant library dependencies that led to issues with use. I pushed a new installer script to Homebrew cask with fixes last night. If you experienced this issue, please try again with the homebrew cask install approach and let me know if you continue to experience problems.
Associated issue report: https://github.com/chrissimpkins...
bugfix v1.0.1 released that should take care of this issue for those who want to use the .dmg installer.
A new right click menu macOS Crunch Image(s) service is available for use with one or more PNG files that are selected in the Finder. Testers needed! If this works, we will push this in the next release of Crunch.
https://github.com/chrissimpkins...
@stevenselcuk Mind dropping an issue report on the repository for this? We can look into it. Note that it must installed with `brew cask` not `brew`.
@dawwito yes Mac only but I would be happy to release a shell script to replicate the processing that happens if you are on Linux or Windows with access to a Linux flavor. I considered building with QT so that there is cross platform support but the massive file size seemed a bit much for this project.
@dawwito There is an open issue report with a proposal for how to address this in:
https://github.com/chrissimpkins...
Please weigh in!
@dawwito Work is underway to support a command line executable for *nix platforms and parallel processing of multi-image requests. This will be released as part of v2.0.0 changes. You can view the progress in https://github.com/chrissimpkins...
@dawwito initial implementation of *nix command line executable support (along with support for parallel image processing with the command line approach) is now available for testing. Details in the original post of the pull request for this work if you are available to help with testing:
https://github.com/chrissimpkins...
@csimpkins I’m sorry but I’m a beginner dev so I don’t really understand what you mean by your comments. I thought it was just an app to download or just a web app