Monday, April 20, 2009

Smush Those Images for the Web

Smush Those Images
Even in the world of broadband, images online should be as small in file size as possible. They mean faster page loading for your visitors -- and thus less chance they'll get impatient and leave -- and less bandwidth used by your site -- which equates to lower hosting bills. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks can all compress images during export to Web formats JPG, GIF, and PNG. However, Smush.It can really downsize things. Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! created this Web-based, open-source image optimizer.
Upload your Web-ready images and watch as Smush.It wrings every last drop of space from them, or use a browser bookmarklet to send an entire page of images to Smush.It. Seconds later you'll be presented with the results of the compression, showing how many unneeded bytes were wrung out, and given the chance to download all the newly compressed images in a ZIP archive. Watch out for file format changes, though; Smush.It likes to change GIF to PNG when doing so can save space. http://smushit.com/

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