Reduce picture or image file size using SmushIt

Posted on October 8, 2008 at 5:28 am

Looking for a quick and easy way to reduce the file size of your digital pictures or images? There are many programs out there that will resize photos or resize pictures for you so that they are optimized for displaying on the Web or sending via email. They do this by basically making the image smaller and reducing the resolution of the photo.

Note that the max number of pixels that can be displayed on a computer screen is 72, also called DPI. Most photos are usually taken with a much higher resolution and that’s why they can be shrunk down so much without losing any quality.

Smushit is a free online tool that lets you optimize your pictures for the web quickly and easily. It’s free and you can reduce the size of as many pictures as you like.

Smushit’s main feature is that it will reduce the size of your images while using image format specific non-lossy optimization tools to shrink the file as much as possible changing the look of the image or the quality.

It will also tell you exactly how much space you saved for each image and will create a single ZIP file with all of the changed image files.

There are three ways you can get photos into Smushit:

1. Upload as many pictures as you want from your computer

2. Provide a list of URLs for pictures that are already on the Internet

3. Download the Firefox extension and simply right-click on the image you want to optimize

I really love how easy this web service is to use. Most websites, you have to upload each picture one by one and it can take forever if you have lots of photos. Smushit is awesome in this respect. Click Browse, choose ALL the files in a directory and click OK. It will automatically upload and begin the optimization process.