Command-line tool to compress Inkscape '.svg' files containing embedded images without a visual loss of quality.

Binary available for download for both Windows and Linux. To install, simply extract the binary to a folder within your environment PATH.

First, you need to run the command Clean Up Document in Inkscape, and save it. This cleans up the document, reorders its content, and saves it by overwriting the existing file.

You can do this in the Inkscape program:

Open your svg Inkscape file
File > Clean Up Document
File > Save

or by command line:

inkscape --vacuum-defs --export-overwrite  <FILE>

Then you can run Inksmash on the file

inksmash [OPTIONS] <FILE>

example:

inkscape --vacuum-defs --export-overwrite  my-catalog.svg
inksmash my-catalog.svg

Inksmash will compress and return a new file with a .min.svg extension.

You can compress this file as many times as you want; only new embedded images will be compressed, while already compressed images will be ignored by the compressor.

Created and tested with Inkscape v1.3.2 on Linux.

-q, --quality <QUALITY>  range 1-100, where 1 is the worst quality and 100 is the best [default: 90]
-m, --move-completed     move completed files to the 'compressed' folder
-e, --extract            extract compressed images to the 'extracted' folder
-h, --help               Print help
-V, --version            Print version

• It recompresses all embedded images using the WebP image format with lossy compression, while maintaining the alpha channel (transparency) if present.

• Extracted images do not contain duplicates; it computes and compares the MD5 hash of each one.

• Inksmash is created using Rust.

On Linux Fedora with GNOME, you can right-click on .svg files and compress them using Script > Inksmash by creating and saving the following bash script with the name Inksmash in $HOME/.local/share/nautilus/scripts:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for f in "$@"; do
    # Clean up, reorder the document, and save it by overwriting the existing file.
	inkscape --vacuum-defs --export-overwrite  "${f}"
	
	# Run Inksmash
    # This will create a compressed copy with a .min.svg extension.
	inksmash "${f}"	
done

Envidera is powered by open-source operating systems and programs, and uses Inkscape for all graphic design.

Embedded images in Inkscape files can increase their size and make them more resource-intensive to use. Inksmash compresses these files, reducing their size and resource usage.

GPL-3.0