[rvhobo7663]

Images slow down a site. Images are indispensable in keeping a website interesting and appealing, however, you lose a big chunk of your audience for every second they have to wait for a website to load. For this reason images need to be optimized, ie, acceptable in quality and light as possible in kilobytes.

When we talk about optimizing image size, we’re not talking about the physical size of the image (500×500 pixels or 8×5 inches), we’re talking about the size of the image file measured in bytes (or kilobytes, megabytes, etc.)

To optimize images, we use a free program for Windows called RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool), V.0.6. You can download it at: http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/download/. We’ve checked it for viruses, but check it yourself when you download it, to be sure.

RIOT is very easy to use. You open the image file and in the lower left you can choose jpeg, png or gif images. Photos are generally jpgs but if you need a transparent background, you’ll want to use a png. For a jpg, in most cases you can use the default settings, except for “quality”. It’s a slider bar. The left image shows the original and its size in kilobytes and the right image shows the optimized version and its size. Slide the bar until the size of the photo is as small as possible while the quality is acceptable. The buttons between the images allow you to zoom in and out to check the quality better. If you click the Save button, it will overwrite the image (it will ask for confirmation) so be sure to put your “originals” in a separate location if you want to preserve the original quality. General options settings are available from the Tools Menu.

Of course, if you have your own favorite image optimizing software or one for platforms other than Windows, please let us know. We’ll test it for viruses and performance and post it here.

• This topic was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by rvhobo7663.