{"slug": "pngquant", "name": "pngquant", "category": "media", "category_name": "Media and creative", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 4, "warners": 0, "score": 2.867, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-11-24", "latest": "2026-09-21", "why": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "pngquant.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://pngquant.org", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["pngquant"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 796506418, "item_id": 49781651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781651", "by": "adamhowell", "date": "2026-09-21", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I quantize to 8 colors with pngquant, trace, then snap every fill back to the nearest palette color.", "excerpt": "Claude and I have spent most of the summer on exactly this problem for Skechworks (skechworks.com), a free little Mac design app I made to help my own workflow that is very similar to yours. I use it for my custom coin shop The Achieve Mint (theachievemint.com). It runs VTracer under the hood too. Most of the cleanup you're doing in Inkscape could possibly be pushed to before and after the trace? Skechworks picks the", "context": "", "use_case": "color quantization before tracing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen Image 2.1"}, {"id": 745624080, "item_id": 46601505, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601505", "by": "archerx", "date": "2026-01-13", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "excerpt": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "lossy PNG compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chromium Has Merged JpegXL"}, {"id": 736614240, "item_id": 46038390, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038390", "by": "F3nd0", "date": "2025-11-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using tools like pngquant [1]", "excerpt": "Fair point, though not entirely true: you can run an image through lossy compression and store the result in a PNG, using tools like pngquant [1]. Likely not as efficient for many kinds of images, but totally doable. [1] https://pngquant.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "lossy PNG compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chrome Jpegxl Issue Reopened"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["lossy png compression", "color quantization before tracing", "reducing texture palettes"], "compared": [], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775499", "title": "Qwen Image 2.1", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958231", "title": "Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597927", "title": "Chromium Has Merged JpegXL", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033330", "title": "Chrome Jpegxl Issue Reopened", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 796506418, "item_id": 49781651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781651", "by": "adamhowell", "date": "2026-09-21", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I quantize to 8 colors with pngquant, trace, then snap every fill back to the nearest palette color.", "excerpt": "Claude and I have spent most of the summer on exactly this problem for Skechworks (skechworks.com), a free little Mac design app I made to help my own workflow that is very similar to yours. I use it for my custom coin shop The Achieve Mint (theachievemint.com). It runs VTracer under the hood too. Most of the cleanup you're doing in Inkscape could possibly be pushed to before and after the trace? Skechworks picks the", "context": "", "use_case": "color quantization before tracing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen Image 2.1"}, {"id": 751441361, "item_id": 46965085, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46965085", "by": "l-p", "date": "2026-02-10", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use pngquant for that.", "excerpt": "While lighting is important, not using halflife.wad and going above the original budget of 500 polys per \"scene\" is what makes modern works look much better. Most of the original textures are under 128\u00d796 px and some suffer from awful palletisation artefacts with purple and orange halos. We still cannot use more than 8 bpp but we can use 512\u00d7512 textures and do a better job at reducing to 256 colours. I use pngquant ", "context": "", "use_case": "Reducing texture palettes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine"}, {"id": 745624080, "item_id": 46601505, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601505", "by": "archerx", "date": "2026-01-13", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "excerpt": "No I meant lossy. This is the library I use; https://pngquant.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "lossy PNG compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chromium Has Merged JpegXL"}, {"id": 736614240, "item_id": 46038390, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038390", "by": "F3nd0", "date": "2025-11-24", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using tools like pngquant [1]", "excerpt": "Fair point, though not entirely true: you can run an image through lossy compression and store the result in a PNG, using tools like pngquant [1]. Likely not as efficient for many kinds of images, but totally doable. [1] https://pngquant.org/", "context": "", "use_case": "lossy PNG compression", "switched_from": "", "story": "Chrome Jpegxl Issue Reopened"}]}