Yahoo tool helps Web programmers shrink images

Yahoo Smush It finds Web site images that can be put on a diet.

(Credit: CNET News)

Yahoo, which has considerable expertise in maximizing Web site performance, has long offered advice on how to speed up sites up by minimizing photo size. Now it's released a tool to help Web programmers automate the process.

The Web-based tool, called Smush It, can perform multiple operations to shrink graphics file sizes without impairing visual appeal, Chris Heilmann of the Yahoo Developer Network said in a blog post after tool creators Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov announced the tool at this week's Ajax Experience conference.

Among the things Smush It can do: convert GIF images to the PNG format; reduce the range of colors used in PNG files; strip out textual metadata from JPEG images.

Web developers can upload images to the site, send it a Web site address, or install a Firefox extension that submits a particular Web site with the click of a button. The tool presents users with a downloadable package of the smaller images that can be substituted.

Perhaps Yahoo should try its own medicine. I ran the tool on the Smush It announcement page and found that Yahoo could be trimmed away 23.6 percent of its graphics heft, saving 20KB of data. The Yahoo Developer Network page could be pared down 9.2 percent, saving 19.5KB.

[mcclurecd]

Have you tested it with images containing Metadata?
On the images I tested, it did make the images smaller, at the sacrifice of metadata. I rely on copyright and contact info in my photos as part of my workflow and with orphan works being shoved on us, I cant afford to use something like this.

[stoyanstefanov]

smush.it now keeps all the metadata in jpegs. The savings are no longer impressive, but we're working on a solution that will strip all needless metadata, but keep the copyright notes

[Arnav]

Hmm Yahoo has some really good tools on the web side. I use YUI extensively on my project and think its pretty good.

[BaronVilhelm]

Maybe it should also save them as 72 DPI...

I was told by two long-time web professionals that it was very important that you should save pictures that are put on websites as 72 DPI (or PPI if you prefer) as that is kind of resolution hat monitors have.

I asked them more about this, as I was pretty sure that saving a JPEG with a different resolution made no difference so long as the number of pixels in width/height was unchanged. They told me that a JPEG was written differently inside the image file if it had a different DPI setting. They also said that if you saved it as 300 DPI, then the computer would display it the same, but it would have to work harder as it had to resize all of that information to be 72 DPI before showing it, which would slow down the rendering.

These were, as I said, web professionals, teaching people on a course. We were all told to do that, there was a slide on doing this and how to do it in Photoshop, etc., like it was an important step in saving photos for the web. I can?t imagine how much time has been wasted since.