The pictures you snap with your digital camera are high resolution pictures – very fine in detail and quality, but very large in file size. You cannot transfer such large files on the Internet easily, therefore it is the usual practice to reduce the image file size before sharing them online. The RIOT (radical image optimization tool) is a free software that can help you easily reduce the file size of your pictures. It supports JPG, PNG and GIF image types.
You can download the RIOT utility from the website of Mr. Lucian Sabo, who is the developer of this program. The download is a portable application packed inside a ZIP file. You can extract the contents of the ZIP file to a folder and run riot.exe from there. The RIOT interface is very easy to follow. All you have to do is open an image file (JPEG, PNG or GIF) and RIOT would quickly tell you the resulting reduced file size after compression. For comparison, the original image is shown in the left side while the resulting image is displayed to the right. The initial image file size and the optimized image file size is also shown at the top of the images.
The auto mode always attempts to compress the JPEG images at 80% quality compression rate. But if you want, then you can change the compression by moving the quality slider. You can also change the encoding type – the standard encoding results in a slightly smaller file size. There is also an option to manually specify how much output file size you want and RIOT would try to adjust the quality settings automatically to achieve it. Other than this, there are standard controls to flip the output image vertically or horizontally and rotate it clockwise or counter-clockwise.
Once you are happy with the preview results shown RIOT, you can save the output file to somewhere on your hard disk by clicking on the Save button in the RIOT toolbar. However if you want to process multiple images in a single go, RIOT also presents a batch mode that you can invoke by clicking on the Batch button in the toolbar. In the batch mode, you can add multiple images, specify an output folder and then click on the Start button to process them.
RIOT is a very useful and productive little utility that can help you easily reduce the file size of your pictures. It can work in automatic mode – deciding all the steps needed to reduce the file size or you can manually specify all the settings and then reduce the picture size. There is also batch mode so that you can process more than one images in a single go.
You can download RIOT from http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/