Tinify allows automatic conversion to JPG PNG and WEBP and changes the lives of many people who want to streamline the images and photos on their website. This is a perfect feature for optimizing a website’s media files before uploading them to the back office of the CMS used.
“Smart WebP, PNG and JPEG Compression for Faster Websites” is the title on the homepage of Tinify. So let’s see if it’s easy to compress and convert automatically images with this famous web tool ! 🙂
TinyPNG or Tinify the popular image reduction tool
A very popular tool for years now, Tinify, also called TinyPNG, is by far the website most often used by website owners who wish to make their images lighter in size . Some people call it the Panda tool because of the mascot which illustrates the site’s favicon but also the main page of the web tool:
This is a mostly free web tool that you surely already know and that you should use if not, at least to test it! 🙂
Automatic conversion functionality to JPG PNG and WEBP
In the past, TinyPNG compressed the image in the format you submitted your image to it. If you uploaded a PNG file, it would compress it and return it to you reduced in size, but still in PNG. Same if you submitted a JPG image. It made it lighter and only in JPG.
But with the automatic conversion functionality if you check it of course, the Tinify tool will offer you your choice of your file in 1, 2 or 3 formats which are :
- JPG
- PNG
- WEBP
How to do it?
Here is the answer in pictures with the capture below. First, before sending your image to be optimized, check the toggle button to the right (circled in pink in the screenshot). Then, choose the format(s) whose conversion you are interested in. For my part, I check everything to see what size savings are made with each format:
Once the image is sent and then reduced, I can compare the new sizes of my image converted by Tinify into JPG and WEBP and its new weight in PNG.
I have 3 advantages in doing this because Tinypng takes care of:
- To reduce the size of my original image which was in PNG
- To convert it to two other potentially more interesting formats (in size)
- To allow me to compare whether WEBP is the ultimate format or not . This is sometimes not the case as in my example, since reducing to PNG gives me a 4kb file while webp is also 4kb. I therefore download my image in PNG which is a format today much more widespread and compatible on the web than webp.
Why change the format of an image?
There are several answers.
Changing the format of an image can help:
- to gain size/weight without degrading the image
- to improve the core web vitals (you can see and follow it in Search Console) of its web pages with more advanced formats using tools like PageSpeed Insights and other GTmetrix. This is the case with webp. The idea is not just to push for the use of webp only. But to make images really lighter and therefore to contribute to making pages faster to display for Internet users .
- to learn about the advantages and/or disadvantages of each popular format.
Why reduce the size of an image and change its format before uploading to a website?
Because it can save you from adding yet another processing tool to your website . Typically, WordPress is the most loaded tool for this type of optimization. However, image optimization plugins are not without consequences on websites. Their processing can be resource intensive. Not all, fortunately, but some yes. Everyone has their own preferences in this area!
If you publish in industrial mode because you have a large web media, obviously, “on site” improvement will be recommended. Although it does not exempt from a minimum reduction in image size before posting online .
Note that WordPress image optimization tools and plugins don’t do magic :
- They will reduce the size of an image or photo sometimes up to 2/3 of the initial weight. But if you upload a 6 MB real estate ad photo, no no no, the tool will not make it a 15 KB thumbnail 😉
- They will reduce the size of the image but will not necessarily do the format conversion. Some tools do it all. Others don’t. You must so search, sort and then test the one that best suits your use.
In short, Tinify remains a safe and good tool for on-the-fly image conversions and reductions ! 🙂
