Software Alternatives & Reviews

PureRef VS pngquant

Compare PureRef VS pngquant and see what are their differences

PureRef logo PureRef

The simple way to view and organize your multiple reference images.

pngquant logo pngquant

command-line utility and library for lossy compression of PNG images
  • PureRef Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-23
  • pngquant Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-10-22

PureRef videos

The Best Free Tool for Artists - PureRef

More videos:

  • Tutorial - PureRef tutorial: a free, cross-platform virtual board for artists!
  • Review - PureRef Review

pngquant videos

Compress PNG Images Up To 80% While Keeping Transparency With pngquant

More videos:

  • Review - OptiPNG JpegOptim PNGQuant Siberian CMS

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PureRef and pngquant)
Image Editing
30 30%
70% 70
Digital Drawing And Painting
Image Optimisation
0 0%
100% 100
Document Automation
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using PureRef and pngquant. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, pngquant should be more popular than PureRef. It has been mentiond 28 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

PureRef mentions (4)

  • how do u guys organize your visual inspiration/refs digitally?
    I mainly use offline means: organising all my files in a hierarchy of folders and using pureref (which I highly recommend) to make moodboards, and ofc an external hard drive to save backups. The only online means I use is google drive for online backups. Source: over 1 year ago
  • HELP! So I want to trace this Image(704x702) into a Pixel art (32 x 32 or 40 x 40) but when I resize it, it gets like this (2nd picture) and if I don't, then the pixels are too small, What do i do?
    If you just want the image to be a transparent overlay while you draw 'through the image'(with it being unchanged) you can use something like Pureref(pureref.com) to set the image as always on top + turn opacity down a bit. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Hide user name in menu bar.
    If you can’t get it to work inside of max, I thought of a free easy workaround you could try. I use the software pureref to manage and quickly access reference images. You could just resize an empty pureref window to cover your username. Change the color and opacity to whatever you want, lock the window and switch turn on the transparent to mouse option and you should be good to go! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Hello Reddit! this is my 1st time posting and i'm excited to share some of my sketches with you guys. I like drawing dynamic poses, it's a really fun exercise!. These 4 girls are from reference pics out of Pinterest. Suggestions are welcome :D. Have a great day!
    The high kicking girl on the right is in a PureRef board I keep to practice gesture. Source: over 2 years ago

pngquant mentions (28)

  • Random Code Inspiration Volume 2
    Image-shrinker is a simple, easy to use open source tool for shrinking images. Under the hood it uses pngquant, mozjpg, SVGO, and gifsicle. You can also install these tools individually if you need to compress some images. I often use pngquantafter exporting PNGs for web projects from Figma or similar tools. I literally run it like this:. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • keeping collection size down (for ankiweb) when needing lots of image cards/notes
    Searching more I found https://pngquant.org/ which I could add to my bulk workflow to make most png's approach the jpeg size. Source: 11 months ago
  • screen capture/snapshot utility with image optimization support/configurability
    But this did prompt me to do some searching, and I see https://pngquant.org/ which seems to achieve jpeg like size reduction while maintaining the file as a png. One difference they note is that this method will typically preserve sharp edges better than jpeg (which is probably a strong plus for my type of use case). Source: 11 months ago
  • Exported png image with color-to-alpha edit is huge
    Pngquant is also great for shaving filesizes down, but unlike oxipng, it's explicitly lossy. It'll reduce colors and even dither, but it will try to keep an image visually similar. Https://pngquant.org/. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Name a program that doesn't get enough love!
    Oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner — optimizing images. Source: over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing PureRef and pngquant, you can also consider the following products

Kuadro - Kuadro is an image viewer that allows you to open as many windows as you want, lay them out as you...

ImageOptim - Faster web pages and apps.

Epic Pen - A windows tool for drawing over your desktop and applications

TinyPNG - Make your website faster and save bandwidth. TinyPNG optimizes your PNG images by 50-80% while preserving full transparency!

MacinCloud - MacinCloud is a Mac cloud platform that provides on-demand Mac cloud servers, flexible dev workload infrastructure and comprehensive Mac in the Cloud solutions

Caesium Image Compressor - Compress your pictures up to 90% without visible quality loss.