FILEminimizer Pictures - The Today’s GOTD Reviewed By Franck

Update: Unlike the GOTD one, there is promotion for the same FILEminimizer Pictures wich is still working.

Registration page:

http://www.balesio.com/campaign/licensing/index.aspx?CID=pcwelt

(copy and paste in your browser)

Just register and you will receive the license AND download link by email.

Source : Sibill on Raymond.cc

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GiveawayOfTheDay.com Series (14)

These days, I’m really wondering where my time is running away - so fast! I was not as present here as I’d have liked to be. That said I check here everyday nevertheless and also at GOTD. After a long serie of pointless programs (in my point of view) GOTD is finally offering today and useful and quality software… So interested 4freers should quickly go and grab their copy !

FILEminimizer Pictures ( regular price € 24.95 ) from Balesio compresses digital photos and images and achieves file size reductions by up to 98%. For example, a JPEG photo with a size of 5 MB can be reduced to only 0.08 MB. The software features an innovative image optimization technology: the powerful compression of an image is achieved without any visible quality loss and during the whole compression process the respective native image file format is maintained, making a subsequent decompression irrelevant.

FILEminimizer Pictures can compress any image or photo while always maintaining quality and image format. The optimized and much smaller image files are ideal to be sent via E-Mail or to be uploaded to portals like FlickR, MySpace, HI5 or Facebook. The software can also compress whole digital photo albums at once and features a search assistant which can find all image files on a computer.

Once again, some comments there are really astounding! I saw a comment seeing a cons the fact that this program overwrites original pictures without prompting!
The fact is… this program never overwrites anything and… you can’t set it up to overwrite anything (you actually need the server version to can do that).
If the minimized picture is created in the same folder as original, then a customizable suffix is mandatorily appended to its filename. If you choose to create the minimized picture in another folder, you can choose to add the suffix or to preserve the original filename…
Enough with that. Back to the program!

As a matter of fact, I actually used it for real (I mean in a real life situation) and was quite impressed with it.
Starting point : a full collection of a wedding pictures. 2000+ jpg files. Between 5 and 7 Mb each, so it’s a 12Gb pictures folder. Pictures are about 5600×3700 px which is really high definition. Obviously, all pictures come with its EXIF tags containing useful informations.

Ending point : a full collection of a wedding pictures. 2000+ jpg files. Between 1 and 2 Mb each, so it’s a 2Gb pictures folder. Pictures are about 5600×3700 px which is really high definition. Obviously, all pictures come with its EXIF tags containing useful informations.
I used the low/print compression which is the setting that minimize the less and preserve the quality the more.

I think it speaks volume on its own…
Nevertheless, I’ll had some extra clarifications.

- I compared a picture, the same from both collections. I noticed any visible difference until I reached a 400 or 500% zoom level. Even then, the quality loss was minime.
Maybe a digital photography master would see things better than I do but for me, and everybody I showed those pictures for comparision found the minimized pictures were perfeclty OK.
In my case, a 400% zoom on such a huge picture shows very small details very big on the screen… so I think 10Gb of spare HD space is worth this very small and subtle loss of quality.

- That said, even if I can see nothing by myself I compared some picture couples with ImageMagick and almost no pixel was left unmodified by FileMinimizerPictures.
(To learn how to compare pictures with imagemagick, see at Raymond’s blog.)
So, obviously if the integrity of the data is essential to you, don’t use FileMinimizerPictures (for example, if you intend your picture to be an evidence in courts, you should be able to prove the original pixels were not altered by any means…) But I don’t think in everyday life, many cares… as long as visual quality is fully (or almost) preserved…
And anyway, as the program don’t delete nor overwrite original files, it’s up to you to decide to delete them, keep them, or backup them on a DVD then erase them to free space on your HD… You choose…

- Two words to say the program is multilingal (first word) and comes with a handy search feature, using filters, to find pictures to optimize (second word).

- All that said, BE CAREFUL ! The original default settings of the program may not suit your needs.
I understand why the editor set them that way : you can hope to have the best possible compression rate. But… sorry to say, that doesn’t sound so smart.
I mean : I turned 12Gb into 2… That’s already great… Is that greater to spare one more Gb if that implies more substantial and visible data loss?
By default FileMinimizerPicture deletes the EXIF tags and resize the picture. It means that it actually changes the picture resolution ; sorry : maybe that’s a lot of spared HD space, but a 1024px large picture is not exactly the same a 5600px large one…
No no no… not in my case, because I intended to archive these pictures and keep them for a long time…
Maybe if you intend to send pictures by email… To me, resizing as means of saving space is mainly pertinent when it comes to automates server processes to upload and store pictures… (for example, you’re managing a webservice where people upload their pictures whatever their resolutions, and get a link to publish their pictures let’s say in a forum post at a 1000px large resolution ; obviously, as the owner of the image hosting web servoce, you don’t need to fill your server with pictures larger than 1000px…)
But you can’t do that with this version of the product ; you obviously need the server edition, which is much more expensive (of course !)
Maybe “allow images to be resized” should be checked by default in the server edition, but not in this “normal” edition!

- Regarding EXIF tags deletion, I’m not sure it’s really intersting. How much space will you spare erasing EXIF? I think not a lot whereas EXIF contains very valuable information : date and time of the shot, possibly geolocalization (if the camera has a GPS chip like Iphone cameras), technical informations about the picture (did the flash triggered or not? …)
So, I for one prefer keep these info, as their lost would not free a lot of space.

So, the reach my ending point from my starting point, I had to go to the settings window, click on the settings for images tab, then untick “allow images to be resized”, and tick “Keep Exif/Meta data information”. That’s surely a marketingly less impressive configuration, but it sounds to me definetely cleverer…
(Regarding the slider in the main window, as I said, I choose the lower position - this time !)

- Last precision, which is a con. Although the editor states you can batch optimize your pictures (which is perfeclty true) he omits to say that you can batch optimize your pictures UP TO 500 AT A TIME.
It’s not written on the editor website, nor in the help file. I’m not sure it’s a justified restriction (the server edition has no such limitation). This 500 pictures limit seems a commercial limitation, and it’s unjustified given the tag price is quite high.

Overall, it’s a powerful tool. Would it be only for my 12Gb pictures collection, it was worth using…

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PS from The Team

Like Franck said with another occasion, Fubar is one of the few guys who are kindly sharing their RELIABLE feedbacks on almost every giveaway from GOTD. And he’s not pervertedly searching for traffic !

Like Franck is doing today, Fubar is frequently correcting stupid conclusions drawn by amateur ( to say the least ) “reviewers”. We use this opportunity to thank him! ( We’re sure many 4Free’ers have the same opinion)

Here’s what Fubar has to say about FILEminimizer Pictures ( We’re sure Franck won’t mind )

The coding could be better, requires a DEP exception if you have DEP enabled for everything, and requests direct disk access, which it doesn’t need.

Has a number of options, I only tried lossless (I doubt JPEG can be recompressed without some additional loss) keeping the same dimensions and format, because that’s generally what I want. Works very well, much better than I expected.

Fast for an image compressor with very good results. I batch-compressed a PNG and a JPEG. The JPEG compression was very impressive and visually looks the same, although I didn’t do a difference of the rendered images.

It handily beat PNGOUT (default settings). Not quite as good as OptiPNG (default settings), but close, and much faster. There are lots of image “optimizers”/compressors, punypng is supposed to have outstanding compression, but it’s an online service.

By the way, if you install OptiPNG, don’t install the third-party GUI/shell-extensions, it was written by an idiot and will seriously screw up your file associations (beyond repair, unless you’ve done a trace, backup, or perhaps set a System Restore Point).

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