With this though, I (as a web designer,) decided to optimize the size of all graphics that I use to build my webpages. For doing so, I came across many ways to do it and many tools which help you do it. I am listing the 6 excellent tools to do so.

Non-techie people can also use it while mailing/uploading photos taken from Digital Camera – which are generally huge in size!

Yahoo Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

Radical Image Optimization Tool

RIOT is free program designed to efficiently optimize images for the Web

http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/

PNGOUT

PNGOUT is a tool which can optimize PNG files created by other programs.

http://www.advsys.net/ken/util/pngout.htm

Online Image Optimizer- GIF, JPG, and PNG

Image Optimizer lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site.

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/

PNGGauntlet

PNGGauntlet is a .NET program that uses Ken Silverman’s PNGOUT to optimize PNG files.
http://brh.numbera.com/software/pnggauntlet/

SuperPNG

SuperPNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for using PNG (“ping”) files.

http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/

I hope that you find the above tools useful. Even if you don’t, Adobe Photoshop has “Save for Web” for you – stay with it!

Fundamentally, both of these formats compress an image to make it web worthy. Any file with a .jpeg or.gif extension is recognized as an image file by a browser. Only when a site loads quickly into a browser we tend to declare it good in spite of the best functionalities operating otherwise. Agreed? Therefore, it is necessary that the file size of the web page remains small.

Here are stated few points that one needs to know about JPEG & GIF: (a subtle reminder for those tech people who know it )

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

• JPEG uses a glossy compression scheme. This signifies that some data will be lost during the process of compression. The quality is inversely affected as more and more compression is done.
• When compared to GIF; browser takes a longer time to display JPEG file.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)

• Image is compressed using LZW compression scheme through GIF. Confused? Even I was when I first came across it. It means that the quality of the image does not degrade when it is compressed.
• GIF89a format incorporates transparency. Isn’t it great? Especially when graphic has to be blended in with the background.
• GIF allows simple animation except the more advanced Flash movies.

When to use what:

One of the worst mistakes that anyone can make is to choose the wrong format for a particular type of image since each of the formats (viz., JPEG & GIF) has its own particular advantage over the other.

GIF files support a maximum of 256 colors. This makes it practical for almost all graphics except photographic images. The GIF format is excellent at compressing images with no gradations and relatively lesser colors in it. While GIF’s may win out with the non-dithering and fewer color images, JPEG with its support for 16.7 million colors is king for dithered continuous tone images (Example:  Photographs). Hopefully, by now you must have determined the difference between JPEG and GIF usage.

NOTE: While using JPEG format, be sure to save the original file because once you lower the quality of an image and save it, the extra data cannot be regained.

Technology is at our disposal and the smartest web graphics can be obtained by complete knowledge and selective usage of the prior. So get going to harness tech understanding for spectacular results