Great write up and +1 kudos to author for diving into the details.
For the mere mortals out there looking to make their GIF, JPEG, and PNG images smaller (and websites faster), I highly recommend ImageOptim (http://imageoptim.com/). This Mac-only tool combines all of the libraries below to compress your images down to the (nearly if not the) smallest, cross-system compatible size.
The coolest aspect of this article IMO was that Gimp's output (with the right options selected) was already the minimum size for a transparent 1x1 gif.
He succeeded in trimming only 6 bytes off of that before he abandoned transparency and that was at the cost of getting errors in some programs with the result (no thanks).
> Mostly pngquant (the new version), optipng and
> advpng. We are still tuning parameters and
> swapping in and out tools based on our benchmarks
> and testing suite.
from their debut on HN back in June, where they caught a lot of flack for being a web service:
If you're desperate to save space (or creating thumbnails), Windows/C# devs can lossily cut down PNGs to 256 color/8-bit using nQuant http://nquant.codeplex.com/
For the mere mortals out there looking to make their GIF, JPEG, and PNG images smaller (and websites faster), I highly recommend ImageOptim (http://imageoptim.com/). This Mac-only tool combines all of the libraries below to compress your images down to the (nearly if not the) smallest, cross-system compatible size.
If you're Mac based, try this:
* ImageOptim http://imageoptim.com/
If you're Linux based, try these:
* PNGOut - http://www.advsys.net/ken/util/pngout.htm
* advpng - http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/doc-advpng.html
* pngcrush - http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
* optipng - http://optipng.sourceforge.net/
* jpegoptim - http://www.kokkonen.net/tjko/projects.html
* gifsicle - http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/