One of the benefits of the JPG (or, JPEG) file format is the ability to compress a photo so it takes up far less space, but still looks good to the eye. For example, a photo taken with my iPhone weighs in at just under 6-megabytes. Imagine trying to email five or six such photos without compressing them first (which, by the way, Mail can do easily).
Compressed to the medium level, the photo’s weight drops to just over 1-megabyte with almost no noticeable change in quality. Even in iPhoto, at the lowest setting, the photo drops down to barely half a megabyte in size, yet still looks like the original 6-megabyte photo.
When it comes to reducing the size of a photo, iPhoto doesn’t give you many options. The inexpensive Compress app does. And it could not be much easier to use.
Compress has two simple slider bars. One is for compression– minimum to maximum. The other is to zoom in on the photo so you can see both the original and the compressed photos side-by-side. As the photo is compressed, the sharpness and detail is lessened.
What could be easier?
Compress works great and is well worth the few dollars you’ll pay, but I wish it had a numerical compression setting, too. Otherwise, well done, inexpensive, and works instantly.