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Conserve Bandwidth (2)

The second and final part of Kai Chandler’s Beginner’s Guide to optimising images for the web.

Part One examined some of the image file types and a simple four part strategy for reducing image file size for web publishing.

There’s a myriad of tools to help you optimise images for the web. Probably every graphical editor incorporates functions to allow you to reduce the dimensions of your image ie. the height and width of your image in pixels. The same tools will also allow you to manage the quality of JPEGs or the colour depth of GIFs to reduce the file size.

Examples of graphical editors include top end tools such as Corel Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks and midrange shareware Paint Shop Pro. Even image management tools such as Thumbs Plus and screen grabbers such as Hyper-Snap DX provide basic conversion facilities. 

If you don’t have these tools, then there’s an easy way – use the web to do the work.

Gifworks www.gifoptimizer.com and GifCruncher www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html are two free online tools to optimise your images. They work in similar ways – first you specify the file on your disk that you wish to optimize, then the file is transparently uploaded to their webserver and optimised to different degrees. You select the one you like best and save it back to your computer. If all this sounds daunting, don’t worry as they are very easy to use.

Let’s look at Gifworks as an example.

1.     Connect to the Gifoptimizer website using the link above.

2.     Select File Open from the File menu of the Gifworks screen (not your browser’s File menu.)

3.     Select the Browse button to select the GIF file on your hard disk that you wish to optimise.  After a moment, your image will appear.

4.     Select Reduce Colours from the Optimize menu to display a set of images, each increasingly optimised. You’ll notice that the file size reduces with the number of colours.

5.     When you have chosen a reasonable compromise between compression and appearance, select the file.

6.     Select File Save from the File menu to display the final result. You are asked to right click on the image then select Save Image As. Give it a slightly different file name. For example if your original image was Holiday2001.GIF, then you could save the revised image as Holiday2001comp.GIF so you know it’s compressed. That way, you retain the original in case you want to try a different optimisation.

Similarly GifCruncher also allows you to upload GIFs and download the optimised output. A sister utility is JPEGCruncher which, not surprisingly allows you to perform similar functions on JPEG image files. You can select Low, Medium or High quality levels.

Although these web utilities are easy to use, they are limited by the speed of the web, so if you are serious about web publishing, you should think about purchasing a graphical tool such as those named above or try shareware equivalent. You can then prepare your images while offline.

 To sum up, there’s no need to purchase and learn new tools to optimise images for the web, you can use online tools such as those at www.gifoptimizer.com and www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html to crunch your image files and reduce download times however, power users will probably need to use a graphics tool locally.