Including images in your website is a great way to help increase interest in your content, especially if you have lengthy articles. We’ve selected several free tools to optimize images, check them out and see which one works for your requirements. The important thing to keep in mind when using photos and other high quality graphics is to ensure they are properly optimized for the web.
Unless your business or service absolutely needs to display high resolution images, it’s best to optimize them first. Showing large, high quality photos and graphics is one of the leading factors for a slow website. An optimized photo or graphic will reduce the file size of your images by compressing the file and also by removing any extra meta data.
Lossy vs. Lossless Image Compression
Some of these tools will allow you to choose between lossy or lossless compression. Lossy compression means that your image will have some loss in the quality of the image. In most cases, it’s not noticeable to the average user. Your visitors will thank you for not uploading the super high resolution photo directly from your digital camera.
Lossless compression, as the name implies, means there is no loss of information in your image files. This option will not significantly reduce the file size since it must maintain the highest quality image. For some website owners, it makes sense to show higher quality photos, such as a photography website. But for most people it’s best to use the lossy compression option since it offers a bigger reduction in file size and that translates into quicker loading times.
5 Online Tools to Optimize Images
- Tiny PNG – Uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your image files (.png and .jpg). I’ve used this site many times, especially for PNG images. You can upload up to 20 images with a maximum file size of 5MB. It seems to do a much better job at optimizing PNG files.
- Kraken – This is another popular image compression tool that I’ve used a lot. It has 3 different modes of optimization, the expert mode is a nice feature for advanced users. It allows you to control the image quality, preserve select metadata, auto orient images and choose your chroma subsampling. Another useful feature is the ability to bulk upload images in a compressed zip file or you can also import from Box, Google Drive or Dropbox.
- Compressor – This tool boasts up to 90% file size reduction while maintaining high quality results with almost no difference compared to the original. It supports the following formats (.jpg, .png, .gif, .svg) with a maximum file size limit of 10MB.
- Optimizilla – This site doesn’t have any initial options to choose from, you can bulk optimize up to 20 photos at a time. It will determine the best optimization and compression automatically. Once uploaded, you can use a slider to choose your desired compression level.
- Resize Photos – This is the only tool in the list that allows you to both optimize and resize an image. Most photos from a digital camera will be quite large in terms of it’s pixel width and height. Having the ability to choose a smaller pixel size will also help in reducing the file size of your image. You can upload the following file formats (.jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .psd), select the desired width, image quality and output format (.jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp).
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