RIOT’s History
Back in the days I was experimenting with lots of new technologies and applications, I was fascinated by the image optimization topic and optimization in general. I mostly had really outdated, slow computers and I hated to wait for every task. Internet was slow, disk space was very limited, optimization for space and speed made a big difference.
One of the programs I liked was Ulead PhotoImpact. It was an advanced commercial photo editor (now acquired, killed and abandoned by Corel). It was much cheaper than Adobe Photoshop and it had a very cool “Save for web” feature. At that time, I need such tool because I was creating websites for clients and with the 56k modem connections, image slicing and image optimization were really necessary.
Already having created a few applications in various languages, I started to work on an image optimizer. This was in 2003, when no such standalone tool really existed.
Creating a standalone tool would have never been a success. It would be very hard for people to find about it and use it. I didn’t had the resources to promote it.
So my first idea was to integrate it in the most popular image viewer worldwide – IrfanView, that is also free and accepts plugins.
I was a IrfanView user for many years. This was my favorite program. This program is as all programs should be – fast, efficient, as big as it should be given it’s features, flexible and extendable. And, again, I have to put this in the context: at that time on my 486 computer or the newer Pentium 1, IrfanView opened instantly and was very responsive, and other applications were much much slower. IrfanView was impressive.
I thought it would be great to add something that was missing for years into this great program – a save for web feature.
So I talked with Irfan, and we set the details. I suggested to create it in C#, but he didn’t want the big .net framework (obviously) as dependency even if on Vista and future windows systems it is installed by default, but I agree with the philosophy of not relying on dependencies.
I revisited my C++ sources from 2003 which were left in alpha state and found a good library called FreeImage. I made some contributions to FreeImage (of course all of them are available for free for the community).
And here is the final result – RIOT.
Irfan didn’t want to deploy 2 DLLs. This resulted in a lite DLL with stripped functionality.
I decided to maintain all advanced features by creating another version of the plugin called Extended version (also free) – formerly named FULL.
For people that don’t have/use IrfanView I created also an EXE (with extended features), and that version became now the RIOT application.
Meanwhile the RIOT plugin was integrated in other programs who benefit of the save for web features like: XNView, GIMP or Paint.NET.
ABOUT ME
My name is Lucian SABO. I am a software architect from Romania, working for more than 20 years with the newest web technologies, mostly on the LAMP stack. I talk with enthusiasm about Architecture, Design Patterns, Clean Code, DevOps and Agile.
I am currently Lead Software Architect at the London-based #1 global startup community – F6S.
In the past I filled several positions including: Full Stack Developer, Project Manager, Agile Team Lead and Consultant.
Contact info: luciansabo at gmail dot com
Hi,
Will there also be a version that supports the HEIC format, which is becoming increasingly popular? That would be a major improvement.
A plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic would be appreciated 🙂
Hi there,
a really great tool. But now i’am on Linux and unfortunately there is no Linux Version. Is that planned for the future?
Thanks for info.
Alex
Unfortunately, RIOT is not yet available in the Winget repository. It would therefore be great to include RIOT in the Winget repository. It’s quite easy to do, and it looks like Riot only has infrequent updates, so it wouldn’t be too much effort. If you would like me to, I can help you with this task.
Can release Mac version
Hi, Can you please add lossless JPEG operations (flip, rotate, crop, etc) to the app? Thanks.
Hi Lucian,
Peter van Essen here from the Netherlands. I was wondering if and how RIOT can be used in commandline-mode. Generating a bunch of commands to execute in commandline-mode would give me the felxibility to convert images to different directories in stead of having to do that all by hand. I have searched, bu I cannot find any documentation on that.
Regards
Peter van Essen
Hello.
I have a new phone, a Pixel, which takes ultra hdr photos. Compressing them with Riot loses this brightening aspect to the photos. Is Riot able to fully support this ultra hdr my phone takes?
Dear Author,
This is the best image-compression software I’ve ever used, and there’s no other software that can compare to it. However, I do have a confusion. After any picture is compressed into the WEBP format, all the picture information gets lost, even if I didn’t check the “Remove Metadata” option. At first, I thought it was due to the WEBP format itself that it couldn’t store the image’s metadata. But later I found that when compressing into the WEBP format using Photoshop, there is an option to retain this information.
I’m just wondering if there are any plans to improve this aspect in the future?
Thank you!
Hello. Is it possible to preserve the ultra hdr mapping in Pixel 9 Pro jpegs using riot at all?
Hi Lucian,
I love your Plug-In and I want to know 2 things:
– your RIOT plugins dll, does it work with Krita 5.26, please?
– Have your coded a RIOT as GIMP plug-in for libgimp-3.0-0.dll because I have GIMP v2.99.18please?
Thanks for your reply in advance.
All my best.
Patrick
Amazing work on RIOT! Thank you.
Hi have been using this brilliant application for ages now. But sadly has stropped working on my system .
Edition Windows 10 Pro
Version 21H2
Installed on 11/06/2024
OS build 19044.4170
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19054.1000.0
Hi,
There’s so many years that I use RIOT, it’s just a wonderful almost every day tool.
I also make a donation for it.
But today, I’m so sad because I was forced to moved to apple because of my work and I cannot find a way to use RIOT. Play On Mac doesn’t work.
I feel like I lost a good friend and cannot find another one like him…
Hi, I’ve been using Riot for years and recently saw jpeg xl is out and can losslessly convert jpegs to the new jpegxl while retraining backwards compatibility, sounds perfect for Riot. Could this be ontroduce? https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/index.html
Thanks for the awesome app!
Could you please add the AVIF support?
Riot is cool program
I’ve been using RIOT for years and love it! The one thing I’ve noticed is that if you compress JPEG to a target size, the percentage granularity isn’t sufficient to hit very close to the target all the time. Is it possible to add an option we can enable to compress JPEGs to a percentage in tenths or even hundredths of a percent? Obviously, the seek time would take longer, but for me, it’s worth the extra wait time.
Thanks so much for his amazing software!
Hello,
thank You very much for Your very nice work!
I like to suggest that You allow to copy the EXIF-Meta data from the source into the target.
These information are sometimes extremly important.
Best regards
Ekkehard
Hi,
Would it be possible for Riot to compress Android ultra hdr images while keeping the ultra hdr map information? Currently, running photos from my P8 through Riot removes the ultra hdr information