JpegMini
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Send full-res iPhone photos and spare your bandwidth via Beamr
The iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and the fourth-gen iPad all carry one key component: a really awesome camera. The 4S has proven to be a workhorse capable of producing some startlingly good images, and the combination of iOS 6's Panorama feature with the improved optics of the iPhone 5 is letting us fall in love with iPhone photography all over again. There's a drawback, though, when it comes to sending those lovely megapixels to friends via email, Facebook or Twitter: they're getting compressed, a lot. Resolution and quality take a hit, and while you can use local sync or Photo Stream to get the full-resolution images, that adds time and complexity. Now a new free app called Beamr is providing a way to get those full-res images off your phone in style -- and without blowing out your network connection. Using Beamr is as simple as launching the app and selecting multiple photos from your library. These go into a "glossy magazine" layout, with an option for you to customize your cover image, headline and credit. Select a sharing mode (email, Facebook or Twitter) and that's all there is to it. The result is a microsite of your images, in the same magazine format, hosted on the Beamr website. Your friends will see the full 8-megapixel resolution of your iPhone photos, in top quality; the images, however, will use only a fraction of the storage space and bandwidth of conventional JPEGs without sacrificing visual quality. Especially on pre-LTE cell networks, the difference in upload time is quite noticeable -- a four-image Beamr magazine makes it off the phone in about the time it would take to send one or two images conventionally. Beamr's Israeli developer, ICVT, first gained notice for its JPEGmini product. Implemented as a web service, a standalone server module and as a Mac app, the proprietary process analyzes a digital image to determine how much it can be compressed without sacrificing perceptible detail. Once that level of compression is fixed, the software automatically puts the photo through a custom JPEG encoder that squeezes the image to the max. The biggest advantage of this approach: the resulting files are plain ol' JPEG format, rather than an esoteric filetype requiring a special browser plugin or preview app. That means you can use them anywhere a normal JPEG would fit -- on your website, for example -- and not worry about compatibility issues. The file size savings can be substantial, ranging from 40 percent up to 80 percent depending on the size and composition of the original. You can try out the JPEGmini tools using the free Lite version of the Mac app, or via the web form. As for the Beamr app, it's fun and dead simple; there are, however, a few minor drawbacks. You can't delete a Beamr magazine right now, so best to be 100 percent sure that you don't include any questionable images. Further layout and customization options may be in the works for in-app purchasing, but right now there's only the one layout choice. You might wish for the ability to simply send your Beamr-compressed image to your regular photo sharing service without the magazine wrapper. In any event, the app is a promising start and a nice showcase for the JPEGmini compression suite. Give it a look.
JPEGmini puts your images on a diet
If you're like me, you've got a hard drive filling up with images. I do a lot of landscape photography, and while I normally shoot in RAW format, they get output as jpegs for the web, email, and the printing service I use. Over the years I've seen a lot of applications that will shrink jpegs, and the jpeg itself is already much smaller than anything that started out in raw, native Photoshop or TIF format. I was offered a new OS X app called JPEGmini to test, and it is impressive. You can drag a folder of photos or even a complete hard drive onto JPEGmini and it goes to work, showing each image it opens and keeping track of how much is saved. It supports images from 2 MB to 17 MB in size, and I have some larger files so the app warned me those would not be shrunk. (Note: The developer says the limitation is resolution, not file size, so any resolution greater than 17 MP will be rejected.) I was a bit skeptical of this shrinking process, so I opened up some of my detailed landscape images and looked at them in Photoshop. I couldn't see any significant difference in the before and after images. I should note that I duplicated a folder of images for this test and worked on the copy, because once you shrink the photos, there is no going back. I saw more than 50% reduction in file size, and there would have been more if I didn't have so many files in that folder larger than 17 MB. This is very nice for sending files via email because I can reduce the file size while keeping the quality. Best of all is that your photos stay in jpg format. No program is going to have trouble opening them. If you want some details on the process, the developers go into more depth about how the application works. Besides the file size caveat, the program only works on jpegs. JPEGmini is US $19.99 through the Mac App Store. It's a little pricey, but it does what it claims. It mightnot be for the pro photographer, but I think most amateur and semi-pros will be thrilled at the drive space you get back. If you'd like to see how the program works without any investment, the developers have a free service on their website where you can upload some files and let their server shrink them and return them to you. Check the gallery for some comparison shots, but remember that these examples are further reduced in quality when we publish them. %Gallery-155373%
