pngout performed better in all the tests I tried for shrinking pngs.

Matt, if I'm not mistaken pngout does some lossy conversion, most notably from PNG-24 to PNG-8. I tried it on OSX but discarded it because of that behavior (as with OptiPNG).

Note that Wikipedia states that pngout does only lossless compression, so I might be wrong. But, reading the official project page, it seems it will convert PNG-24 images to PNG-8 if the PNG-24 image has a 256 colors or less.

Of course, pngout couldn't be used for this project since it's not open-source.

Thats a great news for all the bloggers, who have to use images alot without reducing the quality of images!

Thanks for letting us know! Cheers

As an intellectual property attorney, I would like to thank you for providing me with potentially the largest potential class of DMCA plantiffs to represent ever. However, since I really do have enough to do, I urge you to reconsider providing this tool in its present form, as it will, intended or not, possibly orphan thousands or MILLIONS of photographs and cause a great deal of confusion. You might want to read John Harrington's "Photo Business News" blog entry on the topic, which was entered today. (A quick Yahoo! search will find it for you.)

@MarcW that would be a problem if we did this automatically. As it is, web site owners can remove information with this tool, but it is their decision to do so. If you don't want to optimize your photos that is entirely your choice. If you want to stop people from using your photos, keep them offline. Nothing stops people to take screenshots of your work and save those - which will also mean that any digital watermark is broken.

We received email feedback from several artists about smush it which will definitely help Stoyan and I to improve the tool. It is feedback from the community that makes a tool go from good to great.

We are actively working on preserving copyright information in JPG, while removing other, less important metadata such as camera info, thumbnail, audio files, etc. I'm still surprised you can actually stuff an audio file inside a JPG!

We have a request in to our provider to upgrade Image Magick. When that is complete, we expect this to be a simple feature to add.

If you have any feedback about specific chunks of data that are important to keep, please do forward that along.

Cheers,
Nicole

Chris,

I fail to see how this tool is limited to "web site owners", and how this tool even attempts to confirm any ownership whatsoever - I can feed it any URL I want, whether I am the owner of that site or not. Even the simplest checkbox asking the user to confirm ownership isn't there, and I find it very doubtful any competent Webmaster is going to feed images - by providing public URLs to those images - one by one into such a tool. If you want to make a tool for Webmasters, I'm sure there are plenty there at Yahoo who understand their needs better.

And while there may be other mechanisms to copy images and strip metadata, I think it shows an arrogance, or at least insensitivity, to diminish this issue by saying, in effect, "other people do it" and MOST of all suggesting that if we want to expect developers to respect copyright we should simply not be online. I can only imagine these positions have not been vetted by Yahoo senior management.

Dear MarcW and Roger Howard,

Since those in charge of this project obviously can't come out and say it, I'll say it for them and for all of us desiring to use this tool for what it was intended to to: remove the cruft from images. What I'd like to say is: "screw off". Images do not have built-in support for DRM or copyright notices. Just because you can add a copyright as a comment in the exif data of a JPEG doesn't mean that's what exif is for.

Providing a tool that happens to strip out copyright data is hardly damaging; any photo editing software can do the same thing. Like any kind of DRM, stopping this single tool from removing this info doesn't stop those who actually want to remove copyright disclaimers from doing so.

It's people like you guys, who make money off of nothing more than parading legalese around for nothing more than your own benefit (ie: paycheque), that ruins any effort to make a truly open and community-driven web. You don't care about the artists. You don't "represent" them. You're just running a business designed to squeeze out every penny you can.

Sincerely,

Nate.

I ran a few things through smushit - and I loved it. It worked great.

I like it but do I really need to have Flash enabled in order to upload files?

@nate - I'm a professional photographer and I agree with you completely. Some people just want to moan when other people make something useful.
I've long ago accepted that any image published to the web is likely to get ripped off, that's why I only publish low-res images with a watermark. When folk ripoff your images for use on the web they'll likely copy and paste and generally rip it up with photoshop, removing all the original exif tags anyway.
I appreciate a tool that can better-optimise those images which I've decided to publish, nice one.
What might be handy is some kind of API so that I could feed images to this thing automatically (eg. when I add a new batch of images to the website)...

@Martin Burchell - no, if you don't have flash, you still should be able to use the non-flash upload method. email info at smushit dot com if you still have a problem

Great work, guys. Really nice tool. The one feature I'd love to have with it is the ability to create sprites as well.

Keep it up.

-Adam

...sorry but it does not work in any way for me.

Using WP 2.7 and just updated Smush.it to the newest version brings, as before as well, "Error posting to Smush.it".

Tried FF Plugin... stales. Tried URL upload... stales. Tried Uploader... stales.

I tried now for several days. NO WAY!!!

Would be nice to hear some commments on that!

...tried after posting here... and it worked! Yuppieh!

...nice. You are deleting comments, critisizing the non-function of this plugin. Thats what I call rude!

To anyone, who wants to get some Information about this "smush.it" plugin for Wordpress... it does NOT work!

I Will tear this code appart and for sure... I will not find something in any way interessting!

Do not use this piece of code!

Happy New Year Smushers. :)

@jim We've added some (admittedly minimal) documentation of the API in our FAQ. The tool uses it's own API and you are free to do the same. http://smush.it/faq.php

@Ivo The WordPress extension uses our API, but it was not created by the Exceptional Performance team. If you have specific questions, they would be better answered by the author of that tool.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

Smush it questions (FF extension, API, Uploader, Image Optimization) can always be posted to yahoo groups or info@smush.it

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/exceptional-performance/

Cheers,
Stubbornella

Thank you Nicole and Stefan.Really this is a great tool,all the feature of this tool are super.I think this is a great news for every blogger.Thanks a lot for this beautiful tool.Keep blogging.