The best image compressor, I’ve found that’s free!

If you have been read­ing my blog, which likely isn’t the case, you’ll have read that I went back to my par­ents place for Chi­nese New Year/Lunar New Year. I took a few pic­tures here and there, and they were large files which meant they needed com­press­ing before I could upload them to my blog. I looked at a few software’s and most if not all I came across either placed a water­mark on your image (As it was the free ver­sion of that par­tic­u­lar soft­ware I down­loaded) or you had to com­press files, one by one; a timely process if you have lots of images. I have my lap­top, on which I had already installed a soft­ware before-hand called “Fast Stone Image Viewer”.

As you can see from the image above, there are lots of options and this may look com­pli­cated, espe­cially if you are only look­ing for a sim­ple image com­pres­sor to com­press your large files. How­ever this gives you lots of options. For exam­ple, as you can see in the image above, you can add a bor­der to give off a nice effect around the image itself.

You can also see me high­light­ing with my cur­sor on the “Batch Covert” option in tools, once you have high­lighted the images in the Fast Stone Image Viewer browser. Sim­ply click that and you’ll be brought to this part of the program:

From the above image, you can see that it has all the images listed on the right hand side. You can make addi­tional changes, such as adding a bor­der, chang­ing the names of the files etc in batch and gen­er­ally select­ing the best options which you want per­son­ally. This tool is very handy. It has com­pressed my images from around the size of 3-4mb to 1mb. (While keep­ing a very high res­o­lu­tion of over 2xxx by 2xxx) You can of course make the res­o­lu­tion smaller, which will sig­nif­i­cantly cut down the size of the file, while see­ing no reduc­tion in quality.

Best thing of all about this soft­ware? It is free.  When I mean free, it isn’t that bull­shit, which comes with Ad-ware or you do not get mes­sages pop­ping up all the time sug­gest­ing you to buy the “pro ver­sion”. This is totally free­ware. Although they do sell a ver­sion which you can buy, you really don’t need it, if the above is all your are look­ing for.

You can down­load the soft­ware on their web­site here: http://www.faststone.org/