3 Web Apps To Make Optimize Images For The Web

By: Karan Goel | 13th February 2010

Images are an important part of a webpage these days. A webpage without images is as dull as a pumpkin. It is really very important to optimize your images for use on the Web.

One of the ways to optimize photos for the web is to use CSS sprites. Sprites work best for images that are used inside navigation or other site elements, that are going to remain the same more or less.

Here are some of the options you can use to optimize images for the web.

Smush.It

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized image files.

Online Image Optimizer

Online Image Optimizer lets you upload a gif, jpg or png image of 300KB or less and optimize them. Just choose an image from your computer, upload it and Online Image Optimizer will do the rest for you. It presents you with a number of different versions of the image along with the size and optional preview. Depending upon the purpose you are using the image from you can choose from a set of options. There is evident degradation in image quality in the very low size images. Optionally Online Image Optimizer also gives you an option to convert the format of the image file to one GIF, JPG or PNG.

PunyPNG

PunyPNG lets you optimize GIF, JPG and PNG images for the web by converting them into compressed PNG files. There is minimal to no loss of quality during the compression process and the results are excellent. The site requires flash and has a maximum file size limit of 350 KB.

Which apps do you use to optimize images for the web? Let us know all about them in the comments.