pngquant Installation

Compiling via Rust/Cargo

The old configure && make method is no longer supported.

Prerequisites

Install Rust 1.70 or later: https://rustup.rs

On Windows also install msys-git and Visual C++ Build Tools with Windows 8/10/11 SDK enabled, and reboot.

Building

Get the code by cloning recursively:

# Unix version
git clone --recursive https://github.com/kornelski/pngquant.git

# Windows version
git clone -b msvc --recursive https://github.com/kornelski/pngquant.git

And then build:

cd pngquant
cargo build --release

This will create executable in target/release/pngquant(.exe).

You can build with additional features:

cargo build --release --features=lcms2

The features are:

• lcms2 — compile with support for color profiles via Little CMS.
• lcms2-static — same, but link statically.
• cocoa — compile with support for color profiles via macOS Cocoa.

Compilation with Cocoa image reader

macOS version can use Cocoa to read images. This adds support for color profiles and other image formats as input. However, it also disables support for preserving PNG metadata.

cargo build --release --features=cocoa

Compilation with Little CMS 2

Little CMS library is used by default.

It's linked dynamically if pkg-config is working (e.g. install liblcms2-dev). Otherwise uses static build as a fallback.

Set export LCMS2_STATIC=1 or build --features=lcms2-static to force static linking.

Compilation of libimagequant_sys.a only

If you want to use pngquant's conversion algorithm without loading/saving PNG files, then you can run cargo build --release in the lib/ directory.

The imagequant library doesn't need libpng nor zlib.

Return to home page.