Smush It!
Optimizing images for the Internet can be a pain staking task to make the image as small as possible while still making it look as good as it can. Back in the day when everyone was on dialup web developers used to spend lots of time to make sure those images were as small as possible. With more and more people on high speed DSL and cable connections it is easy to get lazy about image compression. There is also the reality that web publishing has become much easier with content management systems such as Joomla and WordPress. No longer do you have to be a total web geek to be able to run a website or blog, as a result image compression has often been forgotten about. Smush It! is about to change all of that.
While I use Photoshop or the GIMP for my graphic work, I have to admit I don’t take as much time as I used to to make sure images are compressed as much as possible. Smush It! makes it easy to squeeze those images down as much as possible without sacrificing image quality. The site it easy to use and you can upload an image from your computer or through a URL. They also offer a Firefox add on that allows you to upload any image from a URL with a click on the icon in Firefox.
How well does it work? Here are some examples I tried: Original Video Rambler logo: Size: 8.5 KB 
After Smush It! Size: 6.87 KB Savings: 1.60 KB % Savings: 18.84% 
Original Photo: Size: 164.6 KB 
After Smush It! Size: 156.47 KB Savings: 8.17 KB % Savings: 4.96% 
I can see Smush It! being very useful for people that want to compress images for their website or blog to make it load as fast as possible. No longer do you need to spend countless hours fiddling with Photoshop to make the image as small as possible, now all you need to do is Smush It! Bloggers that regularly add photos to their posts can use Smush It! to compress the images and save on bandwidth and file size making their websites load faster. Combine Smush It! with Aviary and pretty soon you won’t need Photoshop any more to create and compress images. Give Smush It! a try and see how much it can compress your images.
Comments
Chris Ng
Great post - but at first I thought you were talking about <a href="http://rsizr.com" rel="nofollow"> Rsizr</a> which resizes in an entirely different way. It's based on something called seam carving (here's one <a href="http://www.seamcarving.com/" rel="nofollow">video</a>) and it essentially lets you change the ratio of the photo WITHOUT losing any content - in other words, you can shrink the background of a beach scene, while keeping the people in it normal sized. Seems like a magic trick. There's a few other applications that do this too but rsizr's the only finished one I know. I've been compiling lists of these online photo apps and you've pointed out a few I've never seen, so thanks!
LGR
I had heard about seam carving and saw a video of it a while ago, but I had still not seen a working application of it until now. Thanks for the link. I guess I know what I will be blogging about next.