How To Bulk Compress Images | Caesium Image Optimizer Windows

Sometimes you need to bulk compress images, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of them. There are, of course, many ways we can do this, but I want to show you this little app that I use on my Windows computer called Caesium. It is free and lightweight 15.3MB download. If you are a developer and want to optimize several images in a directory on your server, please reference Optimize Images with PHP in a Directory on Your Server.

JPEG File Format is Best For Web

When you are getting ready to upload an image to your website, use .jpg or .jpeg format. Why? Because it’s universally supported and loads larger images faster without a noticeable quality loss. The compression of a jpg or jpeg file is better than other file formats. We need to load images fast and make them look good, so use jpg or jpeg format. This also keeps your website pages loading quickly.

Image Sizes For Web

It is important that you understand image sizes for your website. Just remember this, there is 1000 Kilobytes in 1 Megabyte. Your entire webpage should be no greater that 2 megabytes. If you would like to test the images sizes on your current web page use https://tools.pingdom.com/ and enter your website. It will give you a printout of all the elements on your webpage and the size of it.

Lossless Image Compression

You do not have to sacrifice quality with image compression. We just want to save space and have lossless image compression. You can always save the full image on an SD card or your computer. For heaven’s sake, do not upload the full size to the web. All it does is slow your website down.

Caesium  Image Optimizer for Windows

Caesium is an offline image optimizer. It will target a folder on your computer and optimize all the images by putting them in the same folder or it will use a different one if you want it too. This way, you can keep the originals and use the optimized ones for the web.

How To Bulk Compress Images on Caesium

1. Download Caesium
2. Install it on your computer.
3. Have a folder that is full of images that you want to compress.
4. To be safe make a copy of that folder.
5. Now bring up Caesium on your computer.
6. Hit Control + Shift + O on your keyboard.
7. Navigate to the folder that you want to optimize, then click “Select Folder”
8. At the bottom of the screen, you will see where you can tweak your settings.
9. Make sure that you use JPG as the setting. Put your quality around 20 to 30.
10. You can experiment with the other setting later.
11. ON the far right on the bottom you will see “Output Folder”
12. Click on that box and let the program know where you want those optimized picture files to be put.
13. Now click the Compress button.
14. View the images in the folder where you instructed the program to put the images.

For more details, watch the video I made and see how easy it is.

WordPress Image Compression

Many of us take advantage of WordPress Image compression plugins like smush-it or eww image compression. Those are fine to use on the fly but you will not get the same results as this program. It’s always better to compress and optimize your images before you upload them to your website.

Alternative Image Optimizers

There are other image optimizers as well. Here are several that I have found on the internet.

Other Bulk Image Optimizers

• Chrome Extension
• Image Compressor
• Kraken Image Compressor
• Optimole – You have to sign up for this one.
• Image Recycle – You can do PDF’s with this one
• Compress Now – Can do images one by one or download them in a zip file.
• Trimage – For image compression in Linux and Mac Systems
• Tiny PNG – Does PNG files as well as other file types. 20 Images maximum.
• Compressor IO – This will do SVG, PNG, JPEG and PDF files. This is an online optimizer.
• PNG Gauntlet – This is a program you download to your computer. Windows, Mac or Linux. Converts JPG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP files to PNG
• Image Optim for Mac
• V2 Image Optimizer

Single Image Optimizers

• JPEG Image Compressor Only  Compress image file.
• Online Image Optimization – You can use an image that you already uploaded to the web.
• Resize Photo– Online image optimization for one picture at a time.
• Gifts of Speed Tools– Online image uploader does JPEG and PNG files. One image at a time.