Phenquestions
If you take hundreds of photos or screenshots, and save on them on your computer's hard drive, its gonna get full sooner or later. To avoid this, you can save the images to a cloud service, move it to an external storage device, or just delete the ones you don't need anymore.
Sometimes you may want to keep a bunch of pictures because they are irreplaceable, but their file size could be really large, especially if they are in a very high resolution. Imagine can help you recover some disk space by compressing your images. Oh, and don't confuse this with the legacy picture viewer of the same name.
Imagine, the photo compressor, has a clean GUI. Click the Add button or drag and drop some images on to the program's interface, it supports JPG, PNG, and JPEG images. While the add button lets you select multiple photos at the same time, it doesn't load an entire folder. But dragging and dropping a folder adds the contents, so you may want to use that for batch image processing.
Imagine displays a thumbnail of each image that you add. If you want to remove a picture, use the X button, or the Clear All button in the toolbar if you want to start over. The program doesn't support image editing, all it does is compress the images to a slightly lower quality, to reduce the file size.
Adjust the quality by dragging the slider below each image. This allows you to set the quality for the JPG and WebP formats. As for PNG, you can set the color quality. The number next to the slider indicates the chosen value. Select the format you want to convert the image to, by clicking the option in the bottom left corner.
Imagine shows you the file size before and after the compression, as well as a percentage represented the reduction in the size. Click the green dot next to an image, and the program loads it in its built-in photo viewer. This gives you a larger preview of the image, has some zoom controls, a color/quality slider. The before and after buttons are useful, to get an idea of what the image will look like, when the compression is done. You can change the background color of the previewer, this does not affect the image.
There are a few ways to save the compressed images. Use the arrow button above a picture to save the content individually. Or, for a more convenient approach, click the Save button on the toolbar. You have the option to save the image as a new file, or overwrite the older photo directly. I recommend creating a new image, just in case if the output isn't good enough, you can use the original as a fallback.
The button in the top right corner of Imagine's UI opens a modal with three sliders, these are the global quality settings for JPG, WebP and PNG images. This is useful for processing several images at once.
Imagine is an Electron program. It is open source, available for Windows, macOS and Linux computers. There is a portable version too. It's up to you to decide what you want, image quality or quantity. The program does not have a way to select a format for all images in a single-click, so you'll need to set it manually.
