Home Technical Talk

Excellent tools for optimizing your photos

One of the easiest ways to reduce page response time is by optimizing your website images to reduce their file sizes as much as possible. Optimizing images not only makes your web pages load faster, but also reduces your bandwidth consumption, which can translate to significant savings in your hosting bills.

There are several nice tools available at your disposal to shrink and optimize images. In this article, you will find convenient and user-friendly tools for making your web images as tiny in file size as possible.
1.Lossless Photo Squeezer

screen800x500.jpeg

Lossless Photo Squeezer is a professional image size compressor which will reduce your PNG, JPEG and GIF photos and images size with LOSSLESS quality. You can optimize all your photos to save much hard drive space, web space and share full-resolution photos online more faster.

Especially, Lossless Photo Squeezer can import the entire directory (including subdirectories) and output the images back without changing the original directory structure. It is the unique features that you don’t need spend extra time to re-organize all your photos after being optimized.

How it works?
It comes with compression capabilities which compresses and reduces large image size significantly but keep the original resolution, quality. There are three modes for your choice: Lossless mode (png, jpg, gif); Lossy mode (jpg); PNG 8 bit mode.
- Lossless mode will save space > 20% but keep the original resolution
- Lossy mode will save space > 50% with minor quality loss.
- PNG 8 bit mode which converts 24-color png to 256-color png will save space > 60%

2. smush.it!
smushit.png

smush.it! makes optimization of your images a breeze. Created by Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, smush.it! is a tool that is available as a Firefox extension, a bookmarklet, or as a simple web-based application (hosted by Yahoo!). It takes in most types of image formats, and automatically converts GIFs to PNGs (because they’re virtually the same, only that PNGS weigh a whole lot less).

3. RIOT
riot.jpg

RIOT – which stands for Radical Image Optimization Tool – is an image optimizer for Windows users that is available as a standalone application or as an extension of IrfanView. It supports inputs in JPG, PNG, and GIF files and has the ability to strip out image metadata for further reduction of file bloat. It also has some basic image-editing utilities such as pan, zoom, and rotate, and flip built in.

4. PNGOUT
png-out.jpg

Created by game programmer Ken Silverman, PNGOUT is a popular, free, and no-frills tool for lossless optimization of your images. PNGOUT can run in the command-line or Windows Run dialog box. It has a robust set of options so that you can easily customize the way your files are compressed. It takes most of the popular image file formats (such as JPG, GIF, and PNG).

5. Online Image Optimizer
online_image_optimizer.png

The Online Image Optimizer from Dynamic Drive is a web-based tool for compressing your images further. You can either provide the link to the image you wish to optimize, or upload it from your local machine. Besides optimization, you can select what output you’d like the optimized image to be (the default is the same file type as the input). The limitation of Online Image Optimizer is that it only accepts images less than 300 KB.

What’s your image optimization tool?
If your favorite image optimization tool isn’t on the list, please share it with us in the comments: let us know why you prefer it over other image optimization tools.

Replies

Sign In or Register to comment.