The No Title^® Tech Blog

Optimize Images 2.1.0 brings native WebP support, a generalized format-conversion system, on-demand image inspection with EXIF reporting, and a new in-memory API for working with image bytes directly. It is a focused, fully backwards-compatible step forward for the command-line tool and its public API.

This release represents a significant milestone for both Optimize Images and Optimize Images X, marking a coordinated step forward in modernization, dependency cleanup, and internal architecture improvements across the ecosystem.

For a long time, I have been writing here about Python, Python projects, and Python books. It was one of my first programming languages, and the first one I fell in love with. So much so that I have used it as my go-to option for personal side projects, quick prototyping, and algorithm study. However, my professional life as a software developer has been based mostly on C# and .NET. At first, it felt like an overly verbose version of Python; over time, though, it became progressively more natural to me—so much so that I no longer prefer one over the other.

I recently stumbled upon a situation where I needed to quickly convert a Base64 string coming from a web api and save it into a file in disk in order to inspect its contents. Sure, I could have spun up a small program in C# or Python. But honestly, that felt like an overkill for what was essentially a one-off task. In the past I had used an online Base64 converter for a similar task, so it crossed my mind, but sharing potentially sensitive data with unknown third-party services didn’t feel right. So, I searched for an alternative. Surely, there had to be an simpler, more direct solution.

This is a pragmatic book that presents some of the most important topics about the Python programming language in a concise form, designed to make it easier to find out the most relevant information bits in a context where resources abound and frequently are just too overwhelming.

This time, we are releasing both Optimize Images and Optimize Images X at the same time. The original CLI version now uses temporary files with in-memory buffers, which prevents unnecessary I/O, and also displays more detailed and more useful version information. Optimize Images X, the GUI version, is now compatible with Python3.7+ and has the ability to open or preview a selected image.