Easily Speed up FileOptimizer Image Compression

I’ve used FileOptimizer for my image compression needs for many years. I’ve tried other image compressors such as Kraken.io, Compressor.io, TinyJPG, TinyPNG but FileOptimizer meets my needs best. I need to compress PNG, GIF and JPG/JPEG files for my email marketing and website purposes; faster loading images are essential for effective email marketing and webpage load speed is heavily influenced by image sizes (SEO).

My issue with the various apps and services that compress images (excepting FileOptimizer) is that they tend to fall into two distinct categories; online services (which means uploading images and then deflating completed files) and locally installed programs which tend to specialise in specific filetypes e.g. PNG or JPG. What I like about FileOptimizer is that I can drag and drop files into the app and my files, no matter the extension, will be compressed and overwrite my original larger files; it’s very simple and works well.

Why FileOptimizer image compression is slow

One thing that is frustrating with the default FileOptimizer install is that PNG files are very slow to optimise. FileOptimizer uses multiple PNG compression apps and PNG is anyway relatively slow to compress so it can take ages for PNG files to be optimised. By default FileOptimizer compresses your PNG files using all of PNGout, Leanify, OptiPNG, TruePNG, pngquant, ECT, APNG Optimizer as well as others. This makes it very slow.

Instructions to speed up FileOptimizer image compression

Fortunately it is simple to safely disable various of the PNG plugins which greatly improves the speed of compressing PNG files whilst retaining great optimisation. Below are the instruction to disable various PNG optimisation plugins from running when you use FileOptimizer:

1. Install FileOptimizer.
2. Open the newly installed FileOptimizer and then close the program.
3. Search your Windows computer for FileOptimizer.ini and open FileOptimizer.ini in a text editor (such as Notepad or Notepad++).
4. Search for DisablePluginMask in the FileOptimizer.ini file.
5. Replace the entire contents of the line that starts with DisablePluginMask with the following: DisablePluginMask=pngwolf;advpng;pngout;optipng;truepng ; String. Default: ''. Allow excluding execution of certain plugins. It is case insensitive, and allows more than one item to be specified by using semicolon as separator.
6. Save the file and close.

In step 4 above I’ve disabled the PNG compression plugins that I found of little optimisation benefit. You of course may disable others as you see fit for your purposes.

FileOptimizer should now run much faster when compressing PNG files. Please let me know in the comments below if you have found this helpful.