Am I missing something, or is there no way to tweak the compression level of images generated in PNG format?

Are GIF images created with LZW compression by default? I have libungif installed on my system, and I see that Makefile.PL looks for libgif as well, but I can't install libgif because everything and the kitchen sink that is multimedia related on ubuntu gutsy seems to rely on libungif, w/o support for libgif. Can anyone enlighten me?

It strikes me that it would be handy to have a generic quality level between, say, 0 (low) and 100 (high) that would apply the appropriate format-specific compression ratio, so 90 would map to 90 for jpegquality, 1 for PNG's zlib compression, some best-guess for tiff images, etc. Is there anything that does this already?

The ability to drop down to C for operations that need to be fast is absolutely brilliant. I'm wondering, however, if there is any way to access imager as a stand alone C library, without any perl context?