Image optimizer

How to reduce image size

[TheGuyAboveYou]

I re-designed my site and it now loads in 29s
on the worst case modem connection. My competitors
are at 28s. Is there a free program or reasonably priced one that can get down the size of an image and
still keep decent quality?

[limbo]

There is an arsenal of image editing software that'll let you do this:

The big gun - Photoshop
The big guns little sister - Photoshop elements
The pocket rocket - Fireworks
Free armour - GIMP, Irfanview
Straight shooters - Paintshop Pro, Coreldraw.

The choice is wide so really depends on how much you need to do. For file reduction and optimisation from print ready graphics; photoshop get the thumbs up for showing little quality loss over high compression. But for creating web graphcs and keeping them low I love fireworks. Freeware GIMP and irfanview are excellent and I think all of those listed will let you batch process.

[killroy]

WEll, the one I use is called "Image Optimizer" from xat. It has some nifty tricks for jpegs (for GIFs I use photoshop for it's lossy gif compression), and it beats photoshop in size vs quality hands down. Never seen anything like it. I can take any original and compress it to 10-50% smaller then any other program including photoshop with it. Still amazed there are "pro" web designers out there who don't use it, let alone don't knwo about it. Also has batch compression. The one thing I'm still waiting for is a DLL version so I can do on-the fly compression out of a script.

NS

[webcreativz]

Yes, XAT.com Image Optimizer is arguably da best!

Cheers,
Rahul