Caesium for Windows

Caesium is a terrific little photo compression tool by Matteo Paonessa that makes your digital pics easier to store and share. This free tool makes quick work of compressing your JPEG, PNG, and BMP files to manageable sizes without compromising image quality. Caesium lets you preview changes even as you set them. It can process batches of images, setting a different compression level to each image to maintain a consistent level of image quality.

Caesium's user interface has an efficient rectangular layout based around a main list view, with a control panel beneath the main view and a right-hand preview pane showing "before" and "after" views. A pair of icons toggles the previews between thumbnail size and actual size, and you can even zoom in and out, making direct comparisons of fine image quality quick and easy. The control panel's Compression Level slider and row of buttons help give Caesium a look and feel similar to media players, with equally simple operation. We started by adding some images. Caesium's list view displays both the image's original size and its new size based on the selected compression ratio, the ratio itself, the quality level, and the full file path. We could drag these column headings to rearrange them, but clicking on the headings doesn't sort the columns. Selecting an image and pressing Preview displayed the image and previewed its new version based on current settings. We could set the compression level for each image via a slider or by quality level; a handy option for maintaining consistency across images. Selecting a check box labeled Same Quality for All automatically sets compression options for batches. Two entry fields let us specify an output folder (with check boxes labeled Remember Last Folder and Same Folder as Input) and add suffixes.

When we were ready, we pressed Compress, and Caesium swiftly processed our files. Caesium produced impressive results; we reduced images that were hardly bloated by more than 50 percent with no discernible quality loss, thanks in part to the invaluable real-time preview. Caesium's Help menu offers lots of support options, too. This simple, efficient tool is highly recommended.