Pichi

I received an email from Creatable about a new image compression tool called PICHI yesterday and immediately wanted to test its claims. I was not disappointed! What I was most impressed about was the reduction in file size compared to that of JPEGmini, especially on images which had already been optimised for web in Photoshop. I took a sample JPG file and ran some tests on the original file, and then on a version of the same file optimised for web in Photoshop CC. Original JPG – 3,715,604 bytes (3.7 MB) JPEGmini – 1,131,162 bytes (1.1 MB) – a 70% reduction PICHI – 813,261 bytes (815 KB) – a 79% reduction Optimised for web JPG – 1,710,924 bytes (1.7 MB) JPEGmini – 1,339,201 bytes (1.3 MB) – a 22% reduction on an already optimised image PICHI – 835,558 bytes (836 KB) – a 52% reduction on an already optimised image I also tried with a transparent PNG file of a company logo… the original PNG was 7,424 bytes (8 KB) and the Pichi optimised version was 3,788 bytes (4 KB) – a 49% reduction in file size and the transparency was retained… wow! It looks like there could be some great space savings to be made on image heavy websites. There would be a bit of extra work to do since the files would all require renaming, but according to the developer, replacing the original file instead of creating a copy and suffixing the filename with -pichi is planned for a future version, along with being able to drag and drop folders full of images… fantastic news! Once the two issues I mentioned above are addressed, Pichi will be worthy of a full 5 stars. As such, 4.5 is not bad for a new kid on the image compression block!