Yesterday I went into my spam box folder which is always full of a lot of spam. I came across a legitimate email from Christoph Schmid telling me about a new software called FILEminimizer which can reduce the size of the image without losing quality. (Sometimes it’s bad to have spam filter set to high :-) )

I decided to give it a try and then write whatever I felt about it. The first thing that impressed me was the graphical user interface. It’s quite simple and self explanatory. The only confusion was about Pack and Go button which is used to compress an image and then send via email. In my opinion, the button could have been named as Compress & Email which explain a lot more than Pack and Go. Otherwise everything is organized sequentially. So the GUI guides me what to do next.

FILEminimizer (FILEminimizer)

In fact there are only two major actions, Open the files that we want to manipulate and then Optimize the files. We can add multiple files to simultaneous compression. We can also drag and drop the files to the FILEminimizer window. The software is intelligent enough to sort out which are images and which are not. So when we drag a file that is not supported, it is ignored and not added to the list of added files. We can also right click a picture and select FILEminimizer 2.x to add the image to the compression list.

The search files feature is impressive enough to catch the eyes. It’s size filter, file filter and date filter are good enough to find the files from the computer.

fileminimizer search files (FILEminimizer)

My only concern about the search feature is that although it was fast and found almost all the files, it took about 5 minutes to scan my hard drive because of large size but it was taking 50% processor usage. Since I have a Core 2 Duo processor, it means that it was taking 100% of one processor unit.

In this article, all the images given are optimized with FILEminimizer and it has compressed the images to about 70% of the original size, hence, saving about 30% of image bandwidth. Another thing I noticed is that when I insert an image optimized by another software I used before in Windows Live Writer (I use Windows Live Writer to write and publish my articles on Technize) it used to be invisible. Only the border dimensions were visible which told me that the image had been inserted. The compression would also come with the loss of quality. But with FILEminimizer, my initial experience is that it takes care of the image quality while compressing an image.

A good news is that FILEminimizer team is giving away 50 free licenses to Technize readers. The only thing you have to do is to comment about FILEminimizer below in the comments section. After we get enough participants, we’ll distribute the licenses to the lucky winners. The winners will be selected randomly from the comments. Remember, there are 50 licenses and you need to comment as soon as possible to get your free copy of FILEminimizer :-)