If your website is image-heavy with several pictures of large file sizes, it would have an adverse impact on the performance of the site. What you should consider is to reduce the image-sizes. No, I’m not suggesting that you should reduce the number of images on your web pages or that you should reduce the appearance size of the images. I’m suggesting you to use an image optimization tool such as Smush.It to reduce the file size of the images without reducing their quality and without reducing their appearance size. Yes, Smush.It can drastically reduce the file size of an image without compromising with its quality. You can also use it to reduce the file size of your private images or photos, provided they are kept at some valid web address.
Many image editing tools promise to reduce the file size of an image while retaining the image quality. However, most of these tools are not as optimized as Smush.it. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it will optimize an image without changing its look or visual quality. It is the result of a project of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and is absolutely free. Smush.it can process JPG, GIF, and PNG images that are up to one megabyte in size.
Smush.it uses advanced optimization techniques specific to an image format to remove the unnecessary bytes from the image. For example, an image may contain certain meta data within the image file relating to information about the camera, audio files, thumbnails, etc., which is only informative and does not affect the picture quality of the image. You may not be able to read such meta data. But, Smush.It can easily read and remove such unnecessary meta data of an image file (for certain file formats) to reduce its size without affecting its quality. Moreover, it uses certain image format specific tools to try many different image reduction algorithms and figure out which one gives the best result. For example, for GIF images, it tries to optimize GIF animations by stripping repeating pixels in different frames.
How to use Smush.It to reduce file size of an image?
Smush.It is not available now as a separate download. It forms part of YSlow which is an addon for Firefox browser and can be downloaded freely and installed on your Firefox browser. However, you can still try Smush.It from its website without downloading YSlow. For this purpose, visit the website of Smush.It. You’ll notice the following utility to “Try it out”:
The image, whose file size is to be reduced, must be present on the web and you must know its URL. You can enter the URLs of up to 5 images at one time in the said utility. And, then click the Smush button. Within a few seconds, you’ll see the results of the reduction of file size(s) of these image(s), as under:
The above figure would show that when I tried Smush.It from its website, to reduce the file size of 5 different images on my website, the total size of all the 5 images taken together was reduced by up to about 23% of the file size, which is quite substantial. The file size reduction of one particular image was even up to by about 46%. It all depends on the individual image.
Smush.It will give links to the images obtained by reducing their file size in the results of such exercise (see the image above, where the links to these new images are visible). You can download these changed image files to your computer and then upload them to your website to replace the existing files. This is so because Smush.It cannot replace the existing image files at their URLs. You’ve to download the reduced images yourself and then replace the old images with the new ones with reduced sizes. Just take care that in some cases, Smush.It may change the GIF file to PNG file without changing its quality but by reducing its file size; therefore, if you want to replace such GIF file by such PNG file, you may have to change its file extensions in your webpage’s code. Read more about this function at the Smush.It FAQ on its site referred to above.
You can also use Smush.It to reduce the file size of your private images or photos, as mentioned above. The only problem appears to be that these private images should also be present on the web and you should be in a position to provide their URLs. At this juncture, Smush.It does not support uploading of images directly from your own computer. The images have to be present at some web address, as I mentioned earlier. In spite of this limitation, I found Smush.It to be a very useful utility for making the website lighter and load faster. And, the best part is, it costs nothing.
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