Image Optimization made easy with smushit.com

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

Dedication is a really nice thing. Esteemed Yahoo colleagues Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of the exceptional performance team are two people who are dedicated to making the web a faster place.

Both Nicole and Stoyan have been talking about performance of CSS, JavaScript, HTML and also image optimization. Images can be optimized in two ways: visually (what is the quality) and file size. The latter is quite a corker, though as image editing tools leave a lot of information in files that we don’t really need – EXIF information, to be precise. If you open an image in a hex editor you will find a lot of things that can be safely removed without a change in the image quality.

There are a lot of open source tools to optimize images that way – amost one for each image format. Working through all of them can be a drag. This is why Stoyan and Nicole took their knowledge, dedication and all of these tools and built one application that does all the optimizations for you in one go:

You can upload a bunch of images, give it a URL or use it as a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. Smushit will show you how many bytes you can save by removing cruft from the images and gives you all the images as a zip file to replace them on your site. How cool and easy is that?