How To Make Smaller Images For Your Website - Optimize Pictures

You want your online images to be as small as possible ad still look good. Web images that are too large are annoying and will turn your visitors away. The pictures on your pages take up the majority of the download time, so where possible reduce them or avoid them. Removing all the large pictures from a page can ruin your web design, so instead of cutting them completely off you might consider to optimize them. There are many image optimizer programs, available at affordable prices. You may also try our free online image optimizer, that reduces your gifs and jpegs keeping their visual quality at highest levels possible.

A few tips for reducing size of large web images

If you optimize your web images you will have a faster loading website. There are lots of ways to optimize a web page. The one way that will improve your speed the most is by making your images as small as possible. However, the reduction of your webpage's load time can be a tricky task. Striving to make all your images no larger than 12Kb, the weight that fits in a tcp/ip packet, can be a difficult job. Here are three tips to making large web images smaller:

1. Is the web image in the right format?

There are two main image formats for the web, each built for a specific purpose.

JPEG images

This format is for pictures or digital photos with millions of colors, that have a more realistic look. You should use the jpeg format for photographs and other pictures that have a lot of colors. The jpeg format is a "heavy" format, so try to avoid editing and saving the same file over and over again, as the pictures will lose quality. Try to save your jpeg images in medium quality, avoid the veri high, that is usually not much better than the medium version.

GIF images

This format is for images with a maximum of 256 colors. Most images, especially navigation bars and buttons, are created in GIF format. GIF images use an index of colors for the image, colors that are not used in the image, don't need to be included in the index. This format is good for images with a lot of flat color.

2. Is your image properly cropped?

If you have a picture on a webpage check that only the important parts are in the image. Cropping can make your Web image smaller both in dimensions and download size. It also helps to focus on what is relevant in the image.

3. How many colors does your GIF image use?

Saving a 16 color file as a 256-color indexed GIF will increase it's size. When saving as a GIF, it's a good idea to convert the image first to Web colors. If you're using Adobe Photoshop, choose the indexed image mode and then choose Web colors. This will make sure that the colors won't dither on the Web. Then convert the image to the least number of colors it can use and still look correct.