Compress PNG Images Drastically with PNGGauntlet

Most of the websites make use of the PNG image format. PNG stands for the portable network graphic and has the benefit of lossless image compression. Although PNG images are slightly larger than their JPEG counterparts, the PNG images are far much better in quality. If you use PNG images in your website, then you may want to compress them to reduce their filesize so that your website can load a little faster. You can use the free PNGGauntlet application in order to compress the PNG images and make them smaller in size.

The PNGGauntlet uses many well known libraries like PNGOUT, DeflOpt and OptiPNG to compress your PNG images. You can also use it to convert other image formats (like BMP, JPEG, TIFF, GIF etc.) to the PNG format. Since PNG uses lossless compression, the image quality is preserved by PNGGauntlet and only file size is reduced.

You can get PNGGauntlet from the website from Ben Hollis, the developer of this software. It is designed in Microsoft .NET 4.0 so you need .NET 4.0 redistributable installed on your PC. The user interface of PNGGauntlet is very easy and simple. You can start by dragging-and-dropping PNG files (or other image formats) on the PNGGauntlet window.

PNGGauntlet

You have to select a folder where the new compressed PNG files shall be placed. If you want to overwrite the original files then you can select the Overwrite Original Files option. Then all you have to do is click on the Optimize! button. The optimization progress for each of the added image file is shown individually. As an image is compressed, you can see the new file size and compare it with the old file size.

In the options for PNGGauntlet, you can set options for PNGOUT, OptiPNG and DeflOpt algorithms. There are some general options to like check for updates, run compression process with low priority. If the PNG compression is taking very long time on your PC, then you can turn off the OptiPNG and DeflOpt algorithms.

PNGGauntlet

Conclusion: The PNGGauntlet is a free PNG image optimizer and compressor which helps you reduce the PNG file sizes drastically while retaining the original image quality. It can also be used as an image format converter to convert all image types into the PNG format.

You can download PNGGauntlet from http://pnggauntlet.com/.