It seems I frequently face the challenge of dealing with a customer wanting to upload large images or image galleries to their website. Once you get past the challenge of explaining why they shouldn’t upload 10, 5MB images to a gallery page you have to begin the arduous task of teaching them to optimize thier images using an image editing tool. A decision must be made regarding the right software (they never take my advice), download the software, buy the software license, install the software, and then finally properly navigate the application, saving the images in a location they will later find again through the CMS software – you see where I am going with this, right?
I know this is not the cure, but it looked like it might be a helpful tool, Smush.it. After stumbling onto this site I decided I would try it out on 10 random images scattered across 10 of our hosting sites that we developed. I was pleasantly surprised when I gained an average of 8.43% in individual file size without a noticable decrease in image clarity. I know this isn’t dramatic but these were mostly images that had already been optimized during previous development. The two “photo gallery” images I used did improve 16% and 19%.
With it’s ease of use, ability to create an uploads list and then download “smushed” images as a zip file I am planning on trying this out as my solution the next time I run into this client conundrum.
