Today I will show you a program I like to use when I quickly need to compress my photos. I don’t use it for the photos I post daily, as those are compressed very little, but I use it all the time for the blog parts, like the slide-show, or thumbnails, or when I need to send a lot of previews at once.

So here is the program I use. It’s called Caesium Image Compressor. It’s a free program, that even includes a portable version, so you don’t even have to install it. It can be downloaded from Caesium’s site here.

The interface gives you a lot of buttons, but I actually use only three things. I set the quality in the bottom left, choose same folder as input in the bottom right and hit compress. It will automatically add _compressed to the new file name, so this makes it were quick to work with.

And here are two comparisons of the results (view full size by clicking on them). Both are compressed from a 100% jpg to a 80% quality in Caesium. You can see the respective file sizes under them.

1.36 MB

284 KB

1.12 MB

239 KB

Btw. to get the same file size when using the Photoshop save for web dialog, I had to lower the quality to 45-50%.