Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! We're still working on making TinyPNG easier to use and removing some of the kinks. Keep the comments coming!
We created this service because we (our web agency) were building a couple of sites that used very large transparent images. Unfortunately the file sizes were also massive, so we went looking for compression mechanisms beyond traditional lossless optimisation tools, which simply did not reduce our files enough. We built TinyPNG around a couple of existing open source quantising and compression tools.
Initially it was an internal tool, but we were extremely surprised by the consistent good quality of the results. So we decided to share it as an online service so that it is as easy as possible for everyone to reduce file sizes. An API will be coming soon!
Is it always a good idea to use lossy compression? No, certainly not. There are some edge cases that perform poorly. But we think the results are impressive. Use your own judgment! :-)
We actually went looking for PNG files on very popular sites (Facebook, Google, Github, Duckduckgo, many others) and almost all of them could benefit from TinyPNG's file size reduction without noticeable quality loss.
Mostly pngquant (the new version), optipng and advpng. We are still tuning parameters and swapping in and out tools based on our benchmarks and testing suite.
We created this service because we (our web agency) were building a couple of sites that used very large transparent images. Unfortunately the file sizes were also massive, so we went looking for compression mechanisms beyond traditional lossless optimisation tools, which simply did not reduce our files enough. We built TinyPNG around a couple of existing open source quantising and compression tools.
Initially it was an internal tool, but we were extremely surprised by the consistent good quality of the results. So we decided to share it as an online service so that it is as easy as possible for everyone to reduce file sizes. An API will be coming soon!
Is it always a good idea to use lossy compression? No, certainly not. There are some edge cases that perform poorly. But we think the results are impressive. Use your own judgment! :-)
We actually went looking for PNG files on very popular sites (Facebook, Google, Github, Duckduckgo, many others) and almost all of them could benefit from TinyPNG's file size reduction without noticeable quality loss.