Optimize images without losing quality

Today’s digital cameras deliver high quality images that look pristine on the computer screen and also on paper when you print them out. The problem comes when you want to want to share those same pictures online, or send them to your family by email. One 3 MB image is still  manageable, but when you want to share 52 photos from your last vacation things suddenly get difficult… and this is when RIOT comes in handy.

RIOT stands for Radical Image Optimization Tool, and this is precisely what it does: optimizes your images while keeping quality as high as possible. It’s a free tool (for personal and non-profit usage) that works with JPG, PNG and GIF images, and that can be used as a plug-in for GIMP, IrfanView and XnView.

Using RIOT is piece of cake. Open the image you want to optimize – or simply drag and drop it on the program’s interface – and adjust the level of quality with the slider at the bottom of the window. The side-by-side view offered by RIOT to compare the original and the compressed image lets you check the results in real time, and also see what the final file size will be in comparison to the initial one.

Of course, miracles don’t exist: the images processed with RIOT will inevitably lose some quality. The advantage of RIOT is that the program can tell the difference between what’s important and what’s not, and starts with disposable data first. Thanks to this special approach, the images you optimize with RIOT look almost the same as the original one, instead of a blurred mix of pixels.

Original image: 34,7 KB

Image optimized with RIOT: 15,9 KB