zopfli VS Zpng

This project uses HTMLMinifier, optipng, and zopfli to create a custom production Elm build pipeline. You can see how I make use of these tools in this build script. Here are the results in case you're interested. I used the same ideas from this project to build and deploy dwayne/elm-conduit, which you can learn more about in my article Yet Another Tour of an Open-Source Elm SPA.

I'm making a 2D game with lots of PNG assets. I recently found that ZopfliPNG regularly reduces the sizes of my assets by ~3x compared to Asesprite's output. I've tried a few other PNG compression tools, but ZopfliPNG consistently outperforms the others.

I mean something better than Google's best engineers trying to optimize LZ77's compression as much as humanly possible, while remaining compatible with the DEFLATE/zlib bitstream.

zopflipng typically beats pngcrus and optipng (on Linux at least) but by default it drops auxillary PNG chunks [0] which can result in browsers (and other applications) using a different color space, causing the resulting images to look more washed out than the original. To prevent this you need to explicitly pass --keepchunks=cHRM,gAMA,pHYs,iCCP,sRGB,oFFs,sTER to zopflipng.

Unfortunately it (and most other tools) don't have APNG support, keeping only the first frame.

[0] https://github.com/google/zopfli/issues/113

I tried going with a lot of different compression algorithms, in the end a lot of iterations of Zopfli delivers the best result. With that, I got the image down to 591 kB.

I tried zopflipng [1] with the very expensive option suggested from the usage and got 2,493 bytes (original 2,740 bytes, nowhere practical as it took 3 minutes) so you don't have to sacrifice the palette, though I'm not sure if 16 or even 4 color palette will significantly alter the visual.

[1] https://github.com/google/zopfli

> You'd probably get even better results by using PNG's filters instead of QOI

Did anybody ever try this? It would be quite interesting and does not seem too difficult.

The only thing I could find is https://github.com/catid/Zpng which does not use the normal PNG filtering.

Also, Chris Taylor published an experimental PNG library with Zstd hardwired in.

- I feel like the benchmark suite is lacking. For better overview you probably should include libpng results with max compression level and lowest compression level. Lossless modes of AVIF and WEBP would be nice. (also could throw similar project to yours like https://github.com/catid/Zpng) Not saying the benchmark is bad, but IMHO doesn't paint the full picture. From quick test I got significantly better compression on libpng, ofc in expense of time, but you didn't optimize it for speed either. So we have some results, but they are not really representative imho.