08.11.07
ImageMagick JPEG quality and file size
Further to my recent post on installing ImageMagick on OS X, I found that the generated thumbnails were very large in terms of file size, no matter how low I set the JPEG quality. My 100×75 pixel thumbnails were coming in around 40Kb each, which isn’t practical for web pages. Turns out I needed to use the -strip option in convert, which seems to remove all the redundant fluff from the output file. So, if you’re bothered by the large file size from
convert -scale 3%x3% -quality 70 bigimage.jpg thumbnail.jpg
try
convert -strip -scale 3%x3% -quality 70 bigimage.jpg thumbnail.jpg
and save the web from page bloat.