Graphics and making them load faster

fast loading graphics without losing quality?

[Crush]

I have graphic intensive site and I think it loads too slowly. Has anyone got a "magic wand" that will cure my site?

[seindal]

Check if you get repeated requests for the same images from the same clients. If yes, you need to check whether you images cache well.

René.

[korkus2000]

What software are you using to produce the graphics? Are you using jpgs or gifs across the board or are you optimizing each graphic?

[Travoli]

One thing I learned yesterday is that, if you have large chunks of solid color, a .gif is good. for photos, .jpg works better most times.

My header was one big graphic with Photoshopped text and tabs on the left, and a big picture on the right. 31kb .gif. When split in 2, left side .gif and right side .jpg, the whole thing dropped to 13kb. It was amazing. Lesson learned.

[korkus2000]

Another nice trick is to use a 1px gif for large areas that are a solid color. You just make the gif the size you want in the image tag. A couple of bytes for what could be several k.

[mivox]

Check out the results pages of a couple of old image compression contests we had:

GIF (graphic) Compression [webmasterworld.com]

JPEG (photo) compression [webmasterworld.com]

A bunch of our member took two different HUGE starting files, and everyone used their favorite image compression technique to shrink and squash them as much as possible... and the best part is that eveyrone told how they did it! Some great tips to be had in those threads.

Also, there was a more recent discussion of people's various favorite compression programs here [webmasterworld.com].

[chrisforeman2]

go to dynamicdrive.com

they have an online image compression service