Fastly Image Optimizer vs pngcrush

Fastly Image Optimizer automates image processing and delivery for image-heavy sites and apps. It resizes, adjusts quality, crops or trims, changes orientation, converts formats, and serves images on demand at the edge. Transformations are made in real time from request parameters, avoiding the need to pre-generate and store multiple variants. Processed images are cached for reuse. Supported formats are WebP, AVIF, JPEG, and PNG; developers control resizing, quality, format, and cropping through query parameters and configuration. The service integrates with existing asset pipelines and CMS platforms while teams keep their current image sources. It can be enabled through the Fastly control panel or API, while Compute SDK access is available through a beta program. Pricing includes 100,000 image requests per month at free. Paid rates are billed per 10,000 image requests and vary by monthly volume, from $0.50 a month for 100,000–10 million requests to $0.01 a month beyond 5 billion. Every request sent to Image Optimizer, including through the SDK, counts as billable.

pngcrush is a free command-line utility for losslessly optimizing PNG files. It tries compression levels and PNG filter methods to reduce the size of a file’s IDAT datastream, and supports batch processing. Its chunk controls can remove unwanted ancillary chunks or add gAMA, tRNS, iCCP, and textual chunks. The supported format is PNG; image resizing and API access are not provided. pngcrush runs from MSDOS, UNIX, or Linux command lines, and the maker links to precompiled Windows binaries for an MSDOS window. Source code is available from SourceForge and the pmt git repository, with libpng and zlib included in the distribution. The maker permits use, modification, and redistribution without a fee; the license is equivalent to, but not identical with, the libpng license. Build choices matter: the maker warns about overflow vulnerabilities when compiling with certain older unpatched libpng versions, and says a build statically linked with the supplied zlib is believed to avoid a particular double-free bug. The SourceForge files page lists pngcrush-1.8.11.tar.xz as the latest version. Free graphical applications that embed pngcrush are also noted by the maker.