When working with images in Python, it is often necessary to compress or optimize the images to minimize their file size without compromising the image quality. The imageio library in Python provides various options to compress images and adjust compression settings according to our needs.

Installation

To get started, you need to install the imageio library. You can install it using pip by running the following command:

pip install imageio

Image Compression

After installing imageio, we can now compress images using different compression algorithms. Let’s take a look at the example below.

import imageio

# Open the image
image = imageio.imread('input_image.jpg')

# Compress the image using JPEG compression
imageio.imwrite('compressed_image.jpg', image, format='jpeg', quality=80)

# Compress the image using PNG compression
imageio.imwrite('compressed_image.png', image, format='png', compression=6)

In the above example, we first open the input image using imageio.imread() function. Then, we compress the image using different compression algorithms such as JPEG or PNG. For JPEG compression, we can specify the quality parameter from 0 to 100 (higher values mean better quality but larger file size). For PNG compression, we can specify the compression level from 0 to 9 (higher values mean more compression, but lower image quality).

Compression Settings

imageio also provides additional compression settings that can be adjusted to further optimize image files. Let’s see an example below.

import imageio

# Open the image
image = imageio.imread('input_image.jpg')

# Create the compression settings
settings = {'quality': 80, 'optimize': True, 'progressive': True}

# Compress the image using JPEG compression and the specified settings
imageio.imwrite('compressed_image.jpg', image, format='jpeg', **settings)

In the above example, we create a dictionary settings that contains compression settings like quality, optimize, and progressive. We then pass this dictionary as keyword arguments (**settings) to imageio.imwrite() function to compress the image according to the specified settings. These settings can vary based on the compression algorithm being used.

By adjusting these compression settings, we can achieve smaller file sizes while maintaining acceptable image quality for our application.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned how to compress images using the imageio library in Python. We explored different compression algorithms like JPEG and PNG, as well as compression settings to optimize image file sizes. Proper image compression can significantly reduce storage space and improve the performance of image-heavy applications.