Ping! If you deal with PNG files, you need this app

Originally downloaded 10/19/06. The developer’s tag line is a very confident statement, so I can’t help but have my expectations raised. In particular, their claim that Photoshop is one of the worst offenders for writing small PNG files is interesting. I wonder if they’re talking about 24-bit PNG or 8-bit PNG? I’d really like to see smaller 24-bit PNG files… (those are the ones with alpha layers that IE can’t seem to read natively).

Update 10/23/06. OK, I’m sold… I tried Ping! on a couple dozen PNG files I’ve got lying around, all of which were made using Photoshop’s Save To Web export feature. As I suspected (and hoped), Ping! primarily affects 24-bit images with alpha (transparent) layers. The results are much better than I had hoped, with savings of more than 50% of the file size in many cases. I’m not sure what the savings depend on, but the files with the greatest savings seem to be those over 100kb with large alpha layers.

Needless to say, I’ve added this straight away to my Finder toolbar, and I’ll be incorporating it into my image workflows ASAP. Ping! works only as a droplet, by the way… it has no preferences or toolbar. This is a weak point only because you can’t set a preference for where the Ping! optimized image gets saved. By default, Ping! overwrites the original file, so be sure to have backups in case you don’t like the results. I couldn’t see any visual difference between the “before” and “after” images, but there was a big difference in file size!

Version as tested: 1.0.1.