You can never have enough compression utilities.

In the last couple of years, the technology seems to be making some significant jumps, big enough that if your last exposure to making files smaller was, say, WinZip, you might want to re-examine your compression techniques.

Piranha Inc. brings Piranha Byte to the software table, as a way to compress just about any file. The product is targeted at the print and publishing industries, with strengths in the area of image compression.

In the Piranha Byte desktop application, the environment is composed of three panes: archive management (left), file compression (right), and the FTP utility (bottom).
Photo courtesy of Piranha

However, the application does not target the file’s extension as the ultimate determiner of compression. In other words, it doesn’t look at the extension “.tif” and apply a different sort of compression than a “.pdf” file. Compression is performed deeper, at the actual code rather than the code as a predefined block. However, the compression is particularly efficient when dealing with image files, as the test results seem to confirm.

Piranha Byte installs as a desktop application, and installed on my Windows NT workstation without a hitch. PB is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Sun Solaris.

The main desktop screen is composed of four windows (see graphic, top right). On the left is a folder view of your compressed files (archives), which are created from the files you specify. The pane to the right shows the files that you have either selected for compression to be included in the archive, or the files that have already been compressed as well as data about them, such as file sizes before and after compression, and the time required to perform the compression. These windows are navigable by the usual application menus, but the quickest way is simply to drag and drop files for compression and rely on right-mouse clicks for context-sensitive file information once you have the files where you want them.

The bottom two panes relate to the transfer of files. Piranha Byte includes a custom FTP client, which means you can compress files and then send them without ever leaving the application, a decided advantage over separate products. FTP sites are called “destinations,” and the procedure for setting them up will not be a mystery to anyone with experience with a standard type of FTP application.

Clearly, here the star is the compression technology and how well it works. I assumed the role of someone in the publishing business (not too much of a stretch), and arranged a series of high-resolution image files along with a couple of Word documents, to see how the program would handle a non-image type of situation.

The images (three TIFFs and an EPS) were placed into a folder along with the Word document, to check whether Piranha Byte could maintain the existing folder and file structure after the compression process. Then I dropped the entire folder into the main window of the application. The folder structure is held over, meaning that folders are created as necessary within the compressed file in order to maintain the same directory structure as was present in the pre-compressed files.

Precompressed, the five files totaled 136 megabytes. I tried a number of different compression settings, as well as using the popular compression utility WinZip to see how it would compare to a product like Piranha Byte, which is more highly optimized for working specifically with images.

As you can see from Fig. A (below), the compression type affects the final file size that is generated. You have the choice of letting Piranha Byte automatically try all compression methods and then choose the best fit, but that increases the time needed for compression considerably. Making the decision yourself is quite a bit quicker.

The time need-ed can be a factor, since while PB is compressing there is little else you can do with the computer. In my tests, processor us-age was pegged at 99 percent and other windows couldn’t even be opened or manipulated while the compression was taking place. In the group of files in Fig. A, compression times ranged from a couple minutes when I manually chose the compression, to around five minutes total when Piranha Byte tested all the different options.

Decompression was a snap. Double-clicking on the archive launched a command-line level decompressor that was installed when the original program was installed, and the files were extracted in roughly one-quarter of the time that it took to compress them. Even at high compression ratios, the original file size was maintained, and I could not notice any difference visually on the images after the process. The decompressor is free and can be shipped along with the files, in case the person at the receiving end doesn’t have it.

Piranha Byte also ships with the “watched folder” feature, a very handy option in which you can leave the program running on a workstation, and have it check a pre-mapped folder at specified intervals. If Piranha Byte spots a new file being dropped into the folder, it can be set to either automatically compress or decompress it, if the file being dropped in is already an archive. It will also transport the generated archive to a different folder, if you desire. The applications for this feature are many, and as always, I wish just about every image-processing program shipped with something similar, making automation easier.

So is Piranha Byte worth its price tag of $4,000 for a five-user license, before multiple license discounts?
That depends on whether you’re intent on getting the last bit of compression performance, compared to the old standards like WinZip. It certainly does offer a nice degree of integration with the FTP client, and for some the automation capabilities alone will be enough to swing the decision in Piranha Byte’s favor.

I will report that the application seems functionally solid and performs as advertised without many frills that detract from the core of the program. For some, the functionality will no doubt seem a bit lean; for others, it’ll be a blessing in disguise.