Reduce the Weight of Images

The weight of web images is important for optimizing the speed of viewing a Web page. This tutorial explains how to reduce the weight of images with the Gimp, best image compression software and Yahoo’s Smushit Web application.
Prerequisite

This tutorial is quite simple to understand and detail most of the steps. Ideally you have to have the Gimp installed on your computer or at best you still need to know how to download and install this software.
Using The Gimp

The Gimp software is an image editing tool. It’s kind of the free equivalent of Photoshop. If you don’t have it on your computer it’s easy to download Gimp and install it.

Resize an image

By resizing an image, the weight can be reduced significantly. This is advantageous especially since the change of size does not necessarily affect the quality of the image for certain type of use.
To resize an image just click in the taskbar on “image ” (Next to “file “, “edit “…) and then on “scale and image size “.

Then a window opens to choose the new dimensions. You then have to validate the choice of the new dimensions by clicking on “Scale”.

And finally save the image by clicking on “file “-> “Save “.

Reduce the quality of a Jpeg image

The JPEG image format can be compressed at different rates. The more compressed a picture is, the less heavy it is and the worse the quality. The advantage of Gimp is that when a Jpeg image is saved, the software automatically asks at what rate it should be compressed.
The step to choose the compression ratio is to click on “file “-> “Save as ” and in one of the windows that opens, just choose the quality between 0 and 100.

Use Smushit

The Smushit tool allows you to compress an image again. The tool removes unnecessary information without touching the image quality. Here are the characteristic points that make the success of Smushit:

Several types of image accepted
Several ways to send an image (upload or from a URL)
Information to know the weight that was won
At the end all images are included in a ZIP file