Optimizing Images and Pictures for the Web

The GIMP is a great free image editing program. It comes stock with a good set of tools and filters. It supports a good number of file formats and saves jpegs with a certain degree of flexibility. However it does not have a native gif compression ability which is essential for saving certain types of images for the Web. If you are not already aware you can download plugins for GIMP and there happens to be one called “Save for Web” You can find it at the plug-in repository here.

The “Save for Web” plug-in makes it possible to ‘tune’ your file saving process and optimize your images for the Web by balancing quality with quantity. In other words you can adjust various settings and try different types of image formats to find what gives a good quality image with substantial file size savings. There is even an option to change or remove Exif file info and the like.

Smaller file sizes means quicker loading pages. Some may think that this is not a concern with all the high speed connections out there these days, however people are more impatient than ever. It is though getting a high speed connection caused people to expect pages to load very quickly no matter what. Before high speed the average user was quite content to wait 15 seconds for a web page. Now if everything isn’t pretty much instant the cursor starts its quick journey to the BACK button on the browser! If you load a page with even more than half a dozen images and they are all full size (300K +) it is unlikely most will wait patiently for all of them to load.