tinyimg: An R Package for Compressing Images

This article presents tinyimg, an R package created by Yihui Xie for compressing PNG images without external dependencies. It uses two Rust crates (oxipng for lossless optimization and exoquant for lossy palette reduction) bundled within the package, making installation simple via install.packages('tinyimg'). The main function, tinypng(), supports lossless compression with adjustable levels (0-6) and lossy compression using a CIELAB color-difference threshold. The article discusses use cases like reducing vignette sizes in R packages and provides benchmarks showing typical compression gains of 25-35%. It is relevant to IT/TECHNOLOGY as it covers a technical tool for image optimization in software development.