Ben Hollis

Ben Hollis is a long-time independent Windows developer whose compact, single-purpose utilities have quietly earned a cult following among graphic artists, web designers, and anyone who needs to squeeze every last byte out of a PNG file. His flagship utility, PNGGauntlet, wraps three of the most aggressive open-source PNG optimizers—PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and DeflOpt—into one drag-and-drop interface that recompresses images without touching a single pixel. The program is typically used to batch-shrink screenshot libraries, sprite sheets, UI assets, and photograph archives before they are uploaded to servers, embedded in mobile apps, or committed to Git repositories where bandwidth and storage quotas matter. Because it is lossless, designers can iterate freely, knowing that repeated optimization passes will never degrade color accuracy or introduce new artifacts. The tool also doubles as an audit instrument: its detailed log reveals which of the three engines delivered the best savings, giving developers hard numbers for internal reports. Hobbyists invoke it when preparing texture packs for retro games, while e-commerce teams run nightly jobs that feed entire product catalogs through PNGGauntlet before CDN sync. The publisher’s software is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads supplied through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installing the latest version and allowing multiple applications to be queued for unattended batch installation.