Screenshot Compression (with Date Preservation!)

What ⚡

An easy-to-configure wrapper for PNG image compression (using powerful PngQuant algorithm) that preserves file creation dates. Made of MacOS local usage but also configurable for Linux.

Why 🤷‍♂️

Date preservation:

• Running many command line tools will reset a file's creation date to date script is run
• I really like preserving this important piece of meta data
• It's especially nice to preseve this if you have years of screenhots you wish to compress but want to remember the year you captured those images

Helpers provide guardrails:

• Can be hard to remember commands for libraries like PngQuant that don't have a UI
• Wrappers like this can help by augmenting functionality and with reminders around configuration

How 📋

1. First, install dependencies on your Mac. See dependencies below.
2. Rename config-sample.ini -> config.ini
3. Open config.ini and drag the folder into the open editot to get file path
4. Open Terminal.app and run the "Compress.php" file like php /path/to/Compress.php

You'll now see some status info in your terminal.

My usage:

• I have a folder called "Screenshots" in my GoogleDrive and screenshots are set to automatically go there.
• At the end of each work day I look through what has been saved, delete about 30% of them and then run this script to compress the rest

Important note:

• This only touches PNG files so you can run it across a mixed fils system and it will only compress PNG

Dependencies 📦

This script requires installation of PNGQuant on your system:

macOS: brew install pngquant Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install pngquant Windows: Download from pngquant.org

For MacOS usage, this script also requires Xcode Command Line Tools for the SetFile command:

macOS: xcode-select --install

Additional Compression Tools

I also use a tool called ImageOptim

Ideas / ToDos

• I could use Alfred or some automatter to improve this
• Plist files can also be set as services that automate this if you keep a dedicated Screenshots folder as well and wish to just compress files righy away, when you capture them.
• More testing - really only testing this on MacOS but thing it should work on Linux or Ubuntu if time_command is changed
• Perhaps should be renamed from "image-compression" to "image-transformer" given additional of mogrify gives you ability to do much more than just compress an image?

Changelog

2025-06-03

Cleaning up for Github

• Move settings to an "ini" file instead of PHP
• Created a config-sample.ini so could gitignore the main
• Made PNGQuant settings a variable in the config so easier to alter, even though I just keep it the same all the time.
• REMOVED a bash files called Compress.sh that just linked to the php file ... not sure why I had this there. Was like this:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/php /Users/Reess/Code/Tools/aCompression/CompressToolRK/Compress.php

2024-05-02

Fixing date update

Something broke with SetFile command after upgrading to Ventura. The error I got is as follows:

me@mymachine ~ % SetFile 
xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcr

Solved by doing the following.

1. Completely remove command line tools using this kind of dangerous method: sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
2. Reinstall it - sudo xcode-select --install Other standard ways to uninstall and reinstall did not work.