12 Really Useful Image Optimization Tools For Web Designers

Images are very important because they will make your web pages look nicer and more attractive. But, high quality and beautiful images always huge in file size. They make your pages load slower and consume more bandwidth. So we, the designers should optimize the images so that they are tiny in file size, but good in quality.

There are a lot of useful image optimization tools which can help us to optimize and reduce the file size of the images. These applications are available as both web-based and desktop-based applications.

Web based Image Optimization Tools

1. Smush.it

Smush.it is a popular image optimization tool that able to reduce the image file size but retain the quality, which is what we called “lossless” image optimization! You can run Smush.it through the web site (5 images at the same time) or through Firefox’s YSlow extension.

2. Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

The Online Image Optimizer lets you optimize different image file formats such as GIF, JPG and PNG. You can either upload the image from your local machine or paste the URL of an image. This tool able to optimize and convert your image to different file format. The limitations of the Online Image Optimizer are 200KB per file, and only single file allowed per conversion.

3. PunyPNG

PunyPNG uses several optimization techniques. It will first check your images and then determine which technique is the best for that particular image. PunyPNG supports most of the popular image file formats and will automatically determine the converted image format for you.

4. SiteReportCard Image Optimization Tool

SiteReportCard Image Optimization Tool support GIF, JPG and PNG formats. You can either paste the image’s URL or upload it from your computer, and the tool will compress and optimize the image into various size and quality.

Desktop Image Optimization Tools

1. Shrink O’Matic

Shrink O’Matic is an AIR based application which is able to rize image on the fly by drag and drop images onto it. You can choose options like the output formats, output name or the output sizes.

2. OptiPNG

OptiPNG is an advanced PNG Optimizer, which will convert various file formats into optimized PNG. Windows users can integrate OptiPNG into the shell through the OptiPNG Windows Shell Integration project, or use OptiPNG as Paint.NET Plugin. While Mac OS X users can enjoy OptiPNG through the PNGCrusher application.

3. ImageOptim

ImageOptim is a front end tool for a set of image optimization tools. ImageOptim uses AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT.

4. PNGOUT

PNGOUT is a command line application which has a lot of different options. It supports PNG, GIF, BMP, JPG, TGA and PCX formats.

5. PNGGauntlet

PNGGauntlet is a .NET application that use the PNGOUT to optimize PNG files. It is able to convert JPG, GIF, TGA, PCX and BMP files to PNG. If you are not familiar with Windows Command line, you can try PNGGauntlet.

6. JPG & PNG Stripper

This application able to remove unnecessary metadata from the image files. It supports JPG, JFIF and PNG file formats.

7. TweakPNG

TweakPNG is a low level tool for optimizing PNG files. So, you need to familiar with PNG file format in order to use this tool. You can read more about PNG through this site.

8. RIOT – Radical Image Optimization Tool

RIOT able to read and optimize different image formats by reading the magic number. So, it is able to optimize images with uncommon extensions, which makes it unique compare with other image optimization tools. RIOT will display the original and output images side-by-side, so that you can compare the quality of them easily.