September 20, 2026 · fileo Compress
PNG photographs vs logos — stop compressing them the same way
A PNG of a logo and a PNG of a brunch plate share a file extension and almost nothing else. Tools that promise “compress PNG up to 90%” are usually palettizing the logo (256 colors, still looks vector-ish) and quietly converting the brunch to JPEG behind a screenshot in the marketing site.
Logos, icons, app chrome
Few unique colors, long horizontal runs of the same pixel, sharp boundaries. Palette PNG or lossless WebP is the right family. If this compressor’s PNG output is not smaller, that is expected — use a dedicated pngquant locally, or redraw the logo as SVG, which is the actual fix.
Camera PNGs
Some phones export PNG to “avoid quality loss.” You get a lossless wrap around a noisy sensor image. The noise is incompressible. Convert to JPEG or WebP. You will “lose quality” in a way nobody sees and save megabytes they do feel on LTE.
Screenshots with a photo inside
A Slack screenshot that includes a photograph is a mixed document. If the text must stay crisp, stay PNG and crop the photo out into its own JPEG. If the screenshot is only used once in a chat, compress as JPEG and live with a little fringe on the letters. Mix-format pages (PNG UI + JPEG photos) are how grown-up sites stay fast.
A note on “lossless”
Lossless means the pixels match the input of that encode step. It does not mean the PNG matches the scene in front of the camera. The sensor already quantized the world. PNG just refuses to quantize again. That honesty is expensive. Pay for it when the alternative is fuzzy captions. Do not pay for it on a selfie.