Optimize Graphics On Your Website With This Free Tool

A common mistake I see with some websites is that they are not optimizing their graphics as much as possible. They include photos on the site which are much larger than they actually need to be. This of course makes the site load slower, especially for people using a dial up modem.

Here is an example of a typical problem I see. Take a look at these two pictures:

and

They look pretty similar right?

There is a big difference between the two pictures.

The difference is the size of them.

If you right click on each picture and choose "Properties" from the popup menu, it will show you the size of each of the graphics.

As you can see, the first picture is 38082 bytes and the second is only 2644 bytes. You would never know by looking at them that the first picture is so many times bigger.

Instead of taking the time to shrink down the first photo to optimize it, I simply had the html code display it at a smaller size even though the file size stayed the same.

The second photo was optimized for the size that I wanted to display it on the page at.

To see the actual size of the bigger photo, click here.

When done incorrectly, a web page is loading this huge photo into a smaller area. The file size stays huge, it is just visually smaller.

A Free Tool To Optimize Graphics For Your Site

What made me think of this topic is that I was recently working on my wife's real estate web site. I had to put numerous thumbnail photos on the site.

It occurred to me how thankful I was for a free program that helped me easily create optimized thumbnail photos for the site.

The program is called EzThumbs and you can download it for free here.

It is pretty straight forward to use:

• Put the photos that you wish to create thumbnails for in one folder on your computer
• Set Ezthumbs to the size that you want the files to be shrunken down to
• Choose which level of compression you want for the file. I usually settle around 70 (out of 100). This is a nice balance between file size and not having a noticeable loss of quality

What is convenient is that it saves your settings. You choose a particluar size and compression factor and it remembers these settings for the future.

Adjust preferences as you optimize your graphics

It is then just a matter of putting the pictures you want to work on in a separate folder. With a couple of clicks you can create 1 or 101 smaller, optimized graphics for your site.

Download the Ezthumbs program here for free.

Ezthumbs is a nice free program to add to your tool kit of useful programs as a webmaster. Anything that can automate a process for you will save you time whenever you use it.

Do you have a favorite program that you use to automate some portion of your work? I would love to hear about it. Let me know by contacting me here.