When I try using the “Better Compression” option for JPEG, PNG, and WebP image formats in Sitely 6, exporting the site does seem to take longer (as I would expect) but in many cases my images end up being larger than when I leave the setting at “Faster Publishing” (which I would not expect). Sometimes substantially so - one JPEG, for example, exports at around 450K in “Faster Publishing” but 650K in “Better Compression”. Is this a known issue, or am I misinterpreting the image compression options?
While there might be something that needs tuning, the “better” aspect refers to the image quality. The faster compression uses a fixed compression ratio for all images, it tries to strike a balance between quality and size. The “better” goes all in on quality, and runs multiple compression ratios on each image until it finds the one that’s visually nearest to the original, this is often smaller than the “faster” compressed file, though sometimes larger. This can happen with some kinds of image patterns. We can certainly take a look at that specific image if you want to send a project over with the image in it.
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Ah - this makes sense. I wasn’t looking to see if the quality between the two image compression modes was different; I was just looking at raw file sizes. And it explains why sometimes the images end up bigger in file size, but not always. Thanks for the explanation!