Great program, still a work in progress but I woulnt go without!

First the good: My iPhoto library went on a SERIOUS diet:

90,001,035,892 bytes now 33,885,608,207.

right-click on your iPhoto library and show package contents then drag Master, Previews and Thumbnails (and iPod Cache if exists) onto JPEGmini.

Heres how that is real-world important to ME and may be to you: before JPEG mini-mizing, My iPhoto library was 30GB too large to fit on my SSD internal drive so I had to have it on my external drive. The external drive is a FAST one, but not SSD fast, and my battery life drops TWO HOURS with it attached!

Well post-JPEGmini; my iPhoto library shrunk enough not just to fit, but i have 22GB free space! incredible!

I have a couple major gripes, each gets a minus one star.

➀ NOT 64-bit? exqueeeze me? a program thats ONLY job is compression of PHOTOS, a task that could NOT be more-suited to hyper-threading and more cores is not 64-bit.. solid one star reduction, inexcusable. (of course iPHoto also not 32-bit; shame on you apple).

➁ no user settable compression quality. The compression is VERY high quality! Ive re-compressed my wedding photos, my only sons birth photos; every single photo in my iPhoto library, but Im not happy that i lost some quality. Ive saved 56GB so far, but wrote the company that Id have been happier if it was 40 (and i maintained higher quality on the photos).

Heres the story on the compression: you can and will see a difference on NON-retina screens and at 1:1 pixel scale (100% in preview/photoshop) but ONLY on an a-b comparison and it is subtle; the little jiggly bits in the smooth shades will jiggle differently. If you look at a plasma TV up close, you will see the same kind of very weird scattered dots that seem to have nothing to do with the picture, but look perfectly fine from a distance. Its the same thing here. I have not been able to detect any artifacts worth noting on a retina display, though I could see the difference any time on A-B comparison on my non-retina mac-book-pro.

I would be very very surprised if somebody could come up with a real-world example where the difference was even VISIBLE much less a problem. by example, I mean printed piece at 5x7" or a BILLBOARD at 20x60feet; by the time the image is actually reproduced, the methods that get those dots onto paper or on the TV screen etc at a normal viewing distance, you will never ever EVER E.V.E.R. see the difference.

For that reason, there is no rational reason for not re-compressing of your photos with the likes of JPEG mini (well since there is ONLY "the" JPEGmini (patent pending), as far as i know, there are no peers; get yourself JPEG mini. Hopefully they will fix the two bugs mentioned and I would happily rate it 5 stars!

as far as the disapointed review, its a huge misunderstaning of the whole concept of JPEGmini.

JPEGmini is not MAGIC! it will not make ALL JPEGs smaller! It takes advantage of a lack of power of the CPU in cameras loophole.

Cameras do not have powerful CPUs, so in order to keep up with the shooting rate, they can only compress the images a little bit by JPG standards. They undercompress to the point that ➀ they can keep up and ➁ that there are virtually ZERO artifacts from compression. the ➀ they cant do anything about and ➁ they just dont care. For the first few thousand pictures, its no big deal that each image is 4-5mb, but when properly compressed they are 2mb, that adds up to 100s of GB eventually, just wasted space, time and effort.

You can open up each JPG file and re-save in photoshop/graphic converter etc with a compression level of maybe 6-7 and get simlar SIZE file as JPEGmini, but you wont have as good of quality (as the same size on disk) as JPEGmini. If you have ALREADY re-compressed with a different program, JPEGmini of COURSE will NOT make them smaller, you already used a different program to re-compress them.

What JPEGmini is designed to do and does exceptionally well, is to take badly compressed (e.g. not compressed much) images from a digital camera and compress them WELL (e.g. much higher compression while maintaining best possible quality at that size).

OH; i want to mention a couple more things:

➀ the developer has always written me back each time ive ever written. Even before i bought my own copy of the program. I did get the answer NO on my main point of adding a setting for quality so, my review includes the minus one star for that, but Ive been happy to see very quick and personal replies to each time ive sent an email thats a big bonus.

➁ There is a neat feature if you just want to save a TON of space on your backup or archive they added; you can have the compressed files go to a folder, presumably on your external (archive) drive. You can keep your originals in maximum quality but have your backup or archive be compressed. That way you just turned a 2GB drive into a 5GB drive for your backup. If you lose your original you can retrieve the MINId file and nobody will EVER notice it was compressed but it just saved your bacon by the fact you had it. That method as far as i know has one bug; it doesnt keep track of the folders already compressed, so youd better mark them with the label function as archived (make a custom label).

-awr

andrewwynn about JPEGmini