JPEGmini 1.4

JPEGmini is an image compression tool for Mac. I don't know the technicalities behind this application, but it works like a charm, reducing quite a lot the size of your JPEG pictures.

There are a lot of other utilities that can accomplish this, but not without seriously compromising the quality of the images. JPEGmini surprised me a lot. All the pictures that I added looked almost identical to me, and their size reduction was extreme.

To load photos in the app, you can simply drag and drop them or click on the "Choose" button on the main window. After selecting the pictures, they will be automatically processed and the original files will be replaced with the new, optimized copies. I would suggest that you make copies of your images the first time that you use this app to assess whether you like the results or not. In my testing, after processing a batch of 2-megabyte images, their size was reduced 2.1 times, or about 1.1 megabytes per picture. If you process a lot of images, the space savings can be great.

The trial version of this app, JPEGmini Lite, lets you process 20 images a day, which is enough for you to determine whether you want to buy the app or not after that.

In conclusion, this is quite a useful app for people who take a lot of high resolution pictures and need to compress them to share them via e-mail or maybe even post them on the web. It really couldn't be easier to use. There are however, no preferences and no ways to share photos from within the application. I would like at least an option not to overwrite my existing images. Thankfully, there is a warning about this when you use the app for the first time.