Most of the digital photo cameras today save pictures in very high resolution formats. The high resolution pictures contain more data, have better quality and give great print results. But there is only one problem with high-res pictures – they are very large in filesize. Some of the JPEG pictures taken with your digital camera can be as large as 8 megabytes. Such huge pictures take a longer time to be uploaded on the internet and consequently it is not so easy to share them with friends. If you plan to share your pictures online, then you should compress them and reduce their filesize first. You can make use of the free Caesium software to reduce the file sizes of your pictures.
Caesium is an open source software that can be downloaded from the sourceforge website. Here are some of the features offered by Caesium:
- Very high compression without visual quality loss
- Preserves original file format
- Batch processing for multiple images
- Can set different compression level for each image
- Can see the preview of original and compressed image
- Multilingual support for more than ten languages
Caesium is available both in form of an installer and as a portable program. The portable edition does not require you to install anything on your system and you can run it from your USB disk. For the portable edition of Caesium, the downloaded file size is around 11 megabytes. After the download, extarct the contents of the downloaded file to a folder and run Caesium.exe from there.
First thing you should do is add the pictures that you want to compress and reduce their size. You can add one or more pictures or just add a whole folder of pictures to the list. To add a picture, click on the Add Picture button. To add a whole folder, click on the Open Folder button. You can also drag-and-drop images to the Caesium window. You can remove an item from the list if you do not want to compress that image. You can also clear the entire list. Caesium allows you to add pictures of many different formats like BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PPM, XBM and XPM.
Once the images are added to the list, you can go about choosing the compression options. Select one or more images from the list for which you want to set options. You can choose the compression quality for the output file – the lesser the quality, lesser the resulting file size would be. You can also choose to resize the image. Resizing can be done based on the absolute size or a percentage of the original size. You can select the output folder where the resulting images would be saved. There is an option to prepend a suffix to filenames to distinguish them from the original files. Finally, you can click on the Compress button to start the compression process.
In the options for Caesium, you can select a default output folder, check for updates, scan sub-directories when compressing an entire folder. In the compression options, you can choose to drop the EXIF information often added by digital cameras to your pictures. Removing the EXIF tag can reduce the picture size to a certain degree. You can also select if you want to delete the original files after the compression is done (not recommended).
The smallest file size for a comparable image quality is given by the JPEG image files. So if you want to get smaller picture files with acceptable quality, then you should always convert your files to JPEG format. The Caesium software can compress your images, resize them and reduce their file size automatically at the click of a button. You can process a single picture, a set of pictures or an entire folder on your hard disk with Caesium.
You can download Caesium from http://caesium.sourceforge.net/ .