Did You Know Part 1: How to compress a picture without losing quality

Did you know that you can compress pictures and make them considerably smaller without actually reducing the image quality?

Today, we are starting a new series of posts exclusive to windows7themes.net titled “Did You Know”. Here is the first one!

• Part 1: Compressing picture without losing quality
• Part 2: Editing and writing into PDF files (coming)

Reduce Image Files By Stripping Metadata – Works Great!

1. Download imageworsener – a free utility for lossless image compression:

• Download Image Worsener 32-bit 
• Download Image Worsener 64-bit

2. In the ZIP file you find the imagew.exe – extract it

3. Copy and paste the following text into the notepad editor


SETLOCAL
set CURRENTDIR=%CD%
echo %currentdir%
FOR /f "usebackq delims=|" %%f in (`dir /b "%currentdir%"`) DO (
set str1=%%f
echo %str1%
set str3=%str1:~-4%
echo %str3%
set str2="thumb_%str3%"
IF NOT EXIST "thumb_%%f" CALL C:\images\imagew.exe "%%f" "thumb_%%f")
ENDLOCAL


4. Save the file with the extension .bat and select “All files” from the dropdown when saving the file (or it wont actually create a bat file). You could give it the name lossless.bat

5. Open a command prompt

6. Use the CD command to change the directory to C:\images or your own path and copy all of your images that you want to compress there as well. If the directory does not exist create one

7. Now run the script lossless.bat and it will compress all images in the folder.

If something does not work you may have to tweak it a little, I use it in combination with the following script


Set CURRENTDIR=%CD%
CALL C:\images\lossless.bat %CURRENTDIR%
pause Do you want to continue?


8. You could, if you want to go one step further and become more productive, add the code above into a batch file called losslessA.bat and then add this to your context menu

To add the script to your context menu please work through our extensive guide: Adding new items to the Windows 7 context menu

Did you like this advanced tutorial? If so, we will have a few more “Did you know’s” coming. The next one will teach you how to edit PDF files and write text right into PDF documents! HANDY!