pngquant For Mac

Unlike the JPG format, PNG normally does not allow lossy compression. It is meant to be a lossless format, and it has the advantage of supporting alpha transparency. However, large file sizes are sometimes an issue, particularly when these images need to be hosted on websites or transferred.

pngquant is a library that also includes a command-line utility and is designed to facilitate lossy PNG compression. It is intended to provide significant file size reduction while minimizing quality loss, and it also maintains alpha transparency, which is one of the reasons JPG conversion is not always suitable.

The utility can be used directly via the command-line tool, but this is not the most intuitive method and may not be ideal for inexperienced users. Thankfully, several GUIs for pngquant have been created, such as ImageOptim and Pngyu. These can simplify the process by allowing you to load and compress images via a graphical user interface.

The library is meant to be easily integrated into shell scripts, server-side software, and other GUIs. Developers can implement these features into their own applications to enable them to offer higher potential file size reduction for PNG images when this is essential for certain use cases.