[panzi]

Yeah, depending on the image putting a bmp into a zip is actually significantly smaller than a png. Well, bmp has no alpha channel, but just as comment to the size of pngs. pngs even uses the zip algorithm in a way that is supposed to be optimized for images, but apparently it is not. E.g. the tiles here are a lot smaller as bmp in a zip: http://panzi.github.io/mandelbrot/

Ok, it put them into one single zip and can't remember if it was solid or not, so it might be the cross-file compression that makes the major difference here.

[DanitaBaires]

> Well, bmp has no alpha channel

BMP have formats which support 1-bit and 8-bit alpha channels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format. Just open any file in Photoshop and save as BMP then click advanced. Not sure of browser support.

[FooBarWidget]

What? I thought zip and png use the same compression algorithm.

[pornel]

They do indeed.

If you're seeing BMP+ZIP being smaller than PNG it only means your PNG encoder is poor. This can be easily fixed with a PNG optimizer like Zopfli, AdvPNG or OptiPNG.

[ajslater]

I've had the best luck using opitpng and then pngout.

https://github.com/ajslater/picopt ...will do this automatically for you.

Pictopt: A multi-format, recursive, multiprocessor aware, command line image optimizer utility that uses external tools to do the optimizing.

For an all in one GUI for Mac approach to this, try ImageOptim

[imaginenore]

PNGOut is definitely better than OptiPNG most of the time:

http://www.olegkikin.com/png_optimizers/

[jibsen]

zopflipng (with -m switch) is close to or better than the best on those five images:

    1_zopflipng.png  8.466
    2_zopflipng.png 18.739
    3_zopflipng.png  8.012
    4_zopflipng.png 91.879
    5_zopflipng.png  1.117

[Hello71]

zopfli: not a png optimizer.

[chadaustin]

Well, zopflipng is! https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/source/browse/README.zopfli...

[panzi]

Yes, I even mentioned that.