The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Note that FileOptimizer was used to compress the PortableFreeware icon on every page of the site as small as possible.

Edit2: the developer has disabled PDF compression. Ignore this post.

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Figured out something about PDF compression recnetly: by default, it's NOT lossless, as it will reduce overall detail. If you're working in documents, this is a very good thing because 150 DPI is *more* than enough resolution for almost anything you could work on. You can set the program to 300 dpi in options if you're worried about it, or you can just not run this program on high res PDFs.

Edit: developer changed this to 250 dpi by default.

Going to report a bug since the author's contact page is still offline and I know he sometimes checks this page.

Setup: Win7x64

• Process:
  
  1. Launch program (64 bit version)
  2. Drag in a JPG file
  3. Select Optimize all files
  4. Drag in another file (also JPG)
  5. Right-click and select optimize all files

Defect: Original and optimize details aren't present: http://i.imgur.com/GzdIo88.png

(Note that this is a UI issue -- the file still compressed, in fact dropped by 86%)

While I'm posting a bug report, here's a bunch of other notes around the program I've been collecting over the last month or so...


Leanify problem

• [Edit: this concern was fixed in the latest version.] Although there were some file size improvements, the leanify was REALLY slowing down some of my optimizations (MS Office files were taking around 5x longer to compress) so I modified the Leanify.exe file to Leanify-cut.exe and the program worked as normal with the AdvZip and DeflOpt tools.  
• Weirdly it only took a small percentage of my available processor speed: http://i.imgur.com/4l8fcku.png (my system is a Win7x64 4-Core i7 system). Edit: this has to do with not supporting mulch-threading, not Leanify.

Feature requests

• Folder watch - when one of a set of available files comes up, the program will automatically try to compress it.
• Adobe Portfolio - Somehow detect and ignore this embedded format. Right now the program will just zap that down to the "cover" sheet, which is NOT lossless. I can provide some example files if anyone wants to see/test.
• Optional - more gentle PNG compression Some kind of optionally faster PNG compression tool. I recognize it's great currently and the defaults should stay as-is but even the smallest files take 10 minutes on my system. I basically just use PNG Optimizer rather than FileOptimizer.
• Optional - ability to convert various formats to 7z - ZIP Compression seems to work well, basically unzipping and then recompressing the exact same data with a higher compression ratio. However, I can only think of a few instances where I wanted to make a ZIP file slightly smaller by increasing it's compression. I much more frequently want to push it to a better compression algorithm such as 7z (on it's highest settings).

Notes on recent updates

• Lots of neat things in here including an APNG optimizer, updates to mozjpeg and various GIF compression enhancements.  Limited JPEG testing so far has been quite positive.
• Improved WINE compatibility (I am a fan of that effort)
• How do you compress a TAR file? I thought they were by nature uncompressed.

• webfork wrote:[*]How do you compress a TAR file? I thought they were by nature uncompressed.

• • This one I can answer: with GZip (http://www.gzip.org/) or other similar tool.
    
    TAR is just some kind of streaming backup format and as such it is not compressed by default -- in accordance with the Linux software mantra of "doing just one thing, but doing it right", I guess. That is the reason you see many Linux archives bearing a double extension: '.TAR.GZ'. I suspect FileOptimizer is just trying to apply better compression.

Really want to like this program as it seems to do magic with file sizes, but jebus at all the False Positives™ that come with this.



The paranoia in me says not to run this ever unsandboxed, and for me that makes this unpractical for general day to day use.

Yeah, those 6 are some of the best AV solutions out there!

joby_toss wrote:Yeah, those 6 are some of the best AV solutions out there!

Yeah those are probably not the best sources for concern.

Some efforts are underway to try and address this. Hopefully something will come out of it in the next 6 months to a year.

Results on a LibreOffice ODT (Open Text Document) huge file with a ton of data: 898k -> 751k (or 84%). This is remarkable because it's even better than a 7-zip "ultra"-level compression of the same file, which cut less than 1% off the file size.

Unfortunately it also corrupted the file:


OpenOffice had the same response.

I realize this is really something I should contact the developer about but I've had ongoing problems reaching out to him and I *think* he checks this forum so I'll leave this here.

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Edit: temporary workaround: rename or delete Leanify.exe.

Make a post about it over at Sourceforge, he's very responsive over there. http://sourceforge.net/p/nikkhokkho/dis ... optimizer/

Special wrote:Make a post about it over at Sourceforge, he's very responsive over there. http://sourceforge.net/p/nikkhokkho/dis ... optimizer/

Ah thanks for that. Posted.

After tp109's cool speed test for various different text editors, I got really interested in testing.

Quick FileOptimizer PNG format speed test notes

I tested a fairly standard 1600x900 screenshot with a low color wallpaper and a few other smaller windows in the foreground. Here are the informal results:

The program's optimizer is dramatically better than PngOptimizer on many files tested. I didn't however see a dramatic improvement with the use of the available "lossy" PNG option:

• Just using PngOptimizer 74%
• PngOptimizer and then FileOptimzier (for some reason): 38%
• Just Leanify: 31%
• FileOptimizer with default settings: 28% - FileOptimizer with lossy settings: 28%
• FileOptimizer with highest compression setting turned on and lossy compression: 28%

Note that running FileOptmizer took about 1:12, with highest settings 2:25. Leanify took about 0:45. PngOptimizer takes less than a second.

I contacted the author a few weeks ago about support for multithread in this tool. I was planning to fork it myself but it is written in C++ so I couldn't do much myself. Author said this was planned but couldn't give an exact time. He suggested that I used several instances of FO but that's not practical.

I actually have codes to create a copy of this tool in Delphi or C# with MT support (all I have to do is make some changes to TEncoder) but FO supports so many formats it'd take weeks to get them all working. I wrote a small app to optimize jpeg files based on FO but with multithreading and speed difference is gigantic (I optimized thounsands of jpeg files on a system with ssd, 8 core CPU and lots of RAM).

I hope MT support arrives soon.

ozok wrote:I contacted the author a few weeks ago about support for multithread in this tool.

Thanks for keeping this on the front burner. The program could work considerably faster on at least 1/2 the operations I use this for if multi-threading was enabled.

So I've been using this program a LOT and looking for ways to streamline the process. As such, I did some digging and came up with an easy batch file system:

FileOptimizer in a batch file

Steps:

1. Stick a copy of FileOptimizer in C:\portable\FileOptimizer (or edit the batch file listed below)
2. Create an empty text file with the following green text and edit it as needed:
   

   Code: Select all

   "C:\portable\FileOptimizer\FileOptimizer32.exe" "C:\Users\[i]USERNAME[/i]\Desktop\stuff_to_optimize"

3. Name the file optimize_this_folder.bat and launch whenever you want the folder contents to get optimized.
   
   According to the help file, this works recursively.

Efforts with ImBatch's ImageMonitor

• I tried to setup something with ImBatch's "watch" (ImageMonitor.exe) mechanism with ImBatch but so far no luck. The program will launch an external program but only AFTER the batch process is completed and via the main window. This means the watch program ignores the batch file and even the main window won't let you move the files to another location once they're finished. This is important because ImBatch recognizes files it's already optimized but FileOptimizer does not.