Did you know that you can compress pictures and make them considerably smaller without actually reducing the image quality?
Reduce Image Files By Stripping Metadata – Works Great!
Metadata stores information about the author and where the image was taken, often added automatically by DSLR’s or your smartphone without notice. Removing that will strip away a lot of useless data that you may not even want to share.
1. Step Download imageworsener – a free utility for lossless image compression:
2. Step In the ZIP file you find the imagew.exe – extract it
3. Step Copy and paste the following text into the notepad editor
SETLOCAL set CURRENTDIR=%CD% echo %currentdir% FOR /f "usebackq delims=|" %%f in (`dir /b "%currentdir%"`) DO ( set str1=%%f echo %str1% set str3=%str1:~-4% echo %str3% set str2="thumb_%str3%" IF NOT EXIST "thumb_%%f" CALL C:\images\imagew.exe "%%f" "thumb_%%f") ENDLOCAL
4. Step Save the file with the extension .bat and select “All files” from the dropdown when saving the file (or it wont actually create a bat file). You could give it the name lossless.bat
5. Step Open a command prompt
6. Step Use the CD command to change the directory to C:\images or your own path and copy all of your images that you want to compress there as well. If the directory does not exist create one
7. Step Now run the script lossless.bat and it will compress all images in the folder.
If something does not work you may have to tweak it a little, I use it in combination with the following script
Set CURRENTDIR=%CD%
CALL C:\images\lossless.bat %CURRENTDIR%
pause Do you want to continue?
8. Step You could, if you want to go one step further and become more productive, add the code above into a batch file called losslessA.bat and then add this to your context menu
To add the script to your context menu please work through our extensive guide: Adding new items to the Windows 7 context menu
Other Ways To Compress Images
Various plugins can even reduce image filesize on the fly, while services such as Smushit allow you to upload multiple images at once
More Of This?
Did you like this advanced tutorial? If so, we will have a few more “Did you know’s” coming. The next one will teach you how to edit PDF files and write text right into PDF documents! HANDY!
