Ever wondered why when you change the jpg compression of thumbnails it changes the image by a few kilobytes only? The reason, which I was shocked to find out, was that most of the image is actually metadata.
An unfortunately named program, Stripper, allows the removal of this wasteful metadata and produces some amazing results. I should note, it doesn’t change the image visually in any way.
Here are the before and after results for 150x113px thumbnails I commonly use on my blogs;
| Before | After | % |
| 38,422 | 4,684 | -87.81 |
| 37,410 | 4,374 | -88.31 |
| 43,162 | 6,185 | -85.67 |
| 37,684 | 4,430 | -88.24 |
| 38,320 | 4,653 | -87.86 |
| 35,183 | 3,640 | -89.65 |
| 36,627 | 4,113 | -88.77 |
| 36,509 | 4,079 | -88.83 |
| 34,780 | 3,514 | -89.90 |
| 36,197 | 3,983 | -89.00 |
| 42,868 | 6,032 | -85.93 |
| 33,983 | 3,252 | -90.43 |
| 35,586 | 3,750 | -89.46 |
| 40,818 | 5,424 | -86.71 |
| 39,871 | 5,146 | -87.09 |
| 43,178 | 6,160 | -85.73 |
| 36,472 | 4,045 | -88.91 |
| 39,157 | 4,882 | -87.53 |
| 38,853 | 4,800 | -87.65 |
| 39,438 | 4,937 | -87.48 |
| 40,082 | 5,219 | -86.98 |
| 38,956 | 4,864 | -87.51 |
| 41,749 | 5,703 | -86.34 |
| 36,450 | 4,059 | -88.86 |
| 34,283 | 3,361 | -90.20 |
| 37,553 | 4,420 | -88.23 |
| 40,903 | 5,488 | -86.58 |
| 37,298 | 4,327 | -88.40 |
| 37,265 | 4,343 | -88.35 |
| 36,073 | 3,958 | -89.03 |
| 38,171 | 4,594 | -87.96 |
That is an average of 88% saved. Amazing!
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