Smush Your Images to Save Bandwidth, Space

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Oct 3,2008

The faster a web page loads, the better the end-user experience. After all, multiple studies, not just one, have found there’s a limited about of time before people will give up on a site. We all hate to wait, right?

Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance Team has just released an tool that optimizes images for publishing on the web. The cloud-based tool, Smush It!, uses a variety of image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to reduce the size of your images, without losing image quality.

While obviously you can use other tools, the batch processing and ease of use make it something worth trying, at the very least.

You can deliver the images to Smush It! in three ways:

• You can upload a set of pictures in your browser
• You can provide them with a list of image urls
• You can user a Firefox Extension to optimize the images found on any web page

The tool then gives you a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip file that you can download.

When I gave it a series of files I use (repeatedly) on my blog, the tool reduced the images by an average of 24%, as you can see above. It will definitely save on bandwidth, and could definitely save on your bandwidth bill.

And with ISPs instituting bandwidth caps, it’s good for the end user as well as for the site owner.