Compress Your Images

Written by Benjamin Friedman, August 25th, 2016

Adding images to your site or blog is the cherry on top of any website. Text may make up the majority of your site, but without the images to help round it off you'll find it rather bland. It may be tempting to upload that png you just took with your brand new 22+ megapixel full-frame camera, but you might have realized it's about 15 megabytes in size.

15 megabytes is way too big! You don't want to sacrifice your picture's quality, but this isn't going to be framed, it's going to be downloaded. It's up to you to make sure your images are in a more reasonable size for online viewing. So where do you start?

For those mac users out there, we recommend checking out Image Optim. If you don't have a mac you can check out their webservice as well. Both of which are fantastic for compressing and optimizing pngs, jpegs and more! It's also great to note that Image Optim has the capacity to run on entire folders of images, which means that you can optimize all your existing images with a single click.

If you are more of a power user you might be interested in pngcrush, a command line tool for optimizing pngs specifically. Pngcrush is frequently used in compressing and optimizing png images for iOS in particular.

In terms of overall size some of the images for your site just might be too big to start with. Uploading an image that is 4500x4500 for a webpage that's frequently viewed in a 1200x800 frame doesn't make much sense. In this case you should either crop or resize your image in order to remove those extra bytes. Furthermore once you've done this don't forget to opimize your image using one of the methods outlined above, you'll be impressed with how much you can save this way!

If you don't have image editing software you can use pixlr or picmonkey online to perform quick editing changes, such as resizing or cropping. This can save you if you don't happen to have a copy of Adobe's latest image editing software (which is fantastic if you have it by the way).

Overall taking the time to reduce the size of your images physically and digitally pays off when you're running any kind of website. Your site's overall download time will decrease and images will load in less time, resulting in a faster and superior web experience for your users.

Questions? Corrections? Concerns? Contact us at inquiries@axolsoft.com