What if you can compress the images by up to 90% and retain the quality at the same time? This is where Caesium comes in.

Caesium is an image processing software that is able to reduce the size of your picture up to 90%, and preserve the original quality.

Why use Caesium?

The main use is to compress photos while retaining the quality. This feature by itself isn’t what makes Caesium so useful. It is the batch processing and previewing the pictures that make the whole process an enjoying experience. If you ever have the needs to upload more than a couple pictures to the web and needed to change the format and compress them, you know how awesome this application would have been.

Things Caesium can do for you

Here is a breakdown of Caesium’s features:

Compress photos

Depending on the starting file format, you can really shrink the size of the image. If you are starting with a BMP or PNG and converting to a JPEG, you will get the best compression. If you are going from JPEG to JPEG, you will not be able to compress it as much without altering the quality.

Previewing images

Previewing the images before you compress and upload them is a huge time saver. In Caesium’s main window, you can select the image on the left and click preview. If you need the image to be smaller, you can play with the settings a little. If you adjust the quality too low, the picture will be too grainy. If the quality is set to high, the picture will be larger.

Batch processing

If you are changing several images, this is a must have feature. You are able to select all of the images in a folder. If you prefer, you can drag and drop images into Caesium. When you are altering several images, you will be able to select the quality of each image separately. Doing this will give you the best size to quality ratio.

You can also add a suffix to the name of the file during the process for easy searching or filing later.

Portable

If you use a portable applications on your USB drive, here is a great addition to your arsenal. On Caesium’s download page, you will be able to download the .exe or portable version.

Why you would use Caesium

I can see many of you out there wondering where you may need this kind of application. Here are a couple examples of how you could use Caesium:

• Compressing pictures to meet the maximum size requirements for social sites like Facebook
• Sending multiple pictures via email.
• Saving space on your hard drive or USB thumb drive.
• Put a portable version on your USB drive so you can re-size and upload pictures while on the road.
• Keeping the total file size smaller when adding pictures to a document or presentation.

There are plenty of ways you can make use of Caesium and we have only listed a few. What’s yours?

Let’s say that the large file is a movie file found in /home/username/movie/large-file.avi and you want to compress, split and store the smaller files at the folder /home/username/movie/split-flies/, this is what you type in the terminal:

cd movie/split-files (change the filepath to where you want to keep the split files)
tar -cvj /home/username/movie/large-files.avi | split -b 650m -d – “large-files.tar.bz.”

You will now see several files appearing at the split-files folder, each with file size of 650MB and with filenames large-files.tar.bz.00, large-files.tar.bz.01, large-files.tar.bz.02, etc.

To recover and extract the split files, type

cat large-files.tar.bz.* > large-files.tar.bz
tar -xvj large-file.tar.bz

and you can get the original file back.

Do you know of any other ways to compress and split files in Ubuntu?