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Image optimization, in high level, means putting the image through series of process using software; work on its size, shape and finally optimize it to store efficiently. These image optimizers help you save a lot of space over the time. Everyday billions of photos are being clicked worldwide and most of it is being saved permanently to the storage space. When people use different storage options like, HDD, SSD, External HDD, Mobile phones etc. to keep the picture memory of their beloved ones or great moments of their life, I, personally, use Google Photos cloud backup to save mine.
Anyway, the number of photos clicked/minute is not going to go down, unless you come out with something 10 times better than Google Glass, it’s our requirement that we must find a solution to save our images in the most optimized manner possible. When applications like Google Photos comes with an option to toggle between “Hight Quality – Great visual quality at reduced file size” and “Original – full resolution”, no matter which option you choose, you will still end up with great quality image. They say, “Compressing an image will mess up with quality” well, with updated algorithms, this is a thing of past.
Best Image Optimizers
Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a simple tool used for image compression without losing the quality. The tool supports 4 types of file formats; JPG, PNG, GIF and SVG. You can either opt for lossless or lossy compression. The tool promises up to 90% reduction in file size.
The compressor.io is one of the best image optimizer both in terms of usability and reliability. To put the tool for a test, I have tried uploading an image of size 2.81MB and ran a lossless compression. The result was, same quality image but at a reduced file size of 1.90MB. Once the compression process is over, you can either download the file or save it to Google drive or dropbox directly from the tool.
Image Optim
Image Optim is also a great tool designed especially for the mac users. It is one of the best image optimizers available for mac OS. This app is aiming at the people who are into app development for Mac and iOS. ImageOptim will help you shrink the images and thereby saving lot of disk space and also improves the loading speed. The tool also helps you with removing EXIF metadata. Every image we click using our smartphone or camera will have some meta data like, camera model number, ISO, GPS position. The tool can help you remove all these metadata which helps you protect your privacy.
By default, the compression is of type Lossless. If you explicitly turn on the “Lossy minification” option, you will get much smaller file sizes but you may want to compromise on the quality. The company also offers web service APIs to help you with resize and optimization of images on your server. In addition to reducing the file size almost 2 times smaller and loading images faster, the API can apply color profile and additional gamma support which will further enhance the look and feel of the picture.
Image Optimizer
Image optimizer is one of the 100% free and simple image optimizers available online. The tool let you do basic resize, compress and optimize images just by using the online interface. You have to upload your file, select the optimization level; Quality – min file size, very small file size, small file size, normal, high quality and best quality; specify the width, height and finally click the optimize button.
There is also a desktop version of Image Optimizer available for free. But, there is a downside. Images will have a watermark and to avoid this, you have to buy the professional version priced at 29Euro. I would rather stick the web version than the paid desktop version.
TinyJPG
One of the most famous and trusted by thousands of companies, like; Samsung, Walmart, Sony, Airbnb etc, TinyJPG is one of the best image optimizers that is currently available in the market. Don’t get confused by the name, the tool supports compression of both JPG and PNG file formats. How does it work? The folks at the TinyJPG has a complex algorithm which analyzes the texture and pattern of your uploaded image and apply the best compression strategy to give you a best quality image as output.
The tool process the image to give you an output file with almost 70% reduction in the overall size. The company also offers a Photoshop plugin, priced at $50, which will allow you to save the compressed file right from the photoshop window. There is also a server level support using the developer API. This will help you compress your server images on the go. There is also a wordpress plugin available for the bloggers community.
Smush.it
Talking about bloggers, this tool is one of the best image optimizers available for wordpress. With its award winning optimization process, SmushIt has proven its mark in the minds of wordpress enthusiasts across the world. WP smush will automatically compress the images that you upload to your site. The tool achieve this by cutting off the metadata and also resize the images without losing the quality.
During the configuration phase, you set the max width and height so that images will be automatically scaled down before even adding to the media library. This will saves a lot of server size and also helps the site to load much faster. The tool using the WPMU servers to do the compression, that means there is no traffic load on your server. You can compress already uploaded images at a maximum of 50 images at a time.
