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?

Excellent, thanks for your answers!

As for the common compression control, hmmm. You're right, it does get messy since Imager has both lossy and lossless backends. I guess what I really need (read: want) is a way to set defaults for my prefered compression levels at Imager->new() timem so I don't have to specify the compression level I want whenever I call write(). So I would say my $img = Imager->new(default_jpeg_compression => 33, default_png_compression => 9, default_tiff_compression => ...); Later calls to write with explicit arguments would of course could override these defaults, however. Whatcha think?

I wonder how much work it would be to create a stand-alone implementation of LZW to fall back on for gif compression. giflib and libgd (at least) both have working implementations which might be snarfed if the license is compatible (this is thinking out loud more than a request)

Cheers,
Brian