I asked Brian D. Hawkins of HotBlogTips to share with us his tips for optimizing images in blogs:
When designing a website or adding images to a blog post, size does matter… file size that is. The larger the file size, the slower the page load time and that can be bad news for your PageRank. Improving page load speed can help your PageRank and bring you higher in the search engine results. Image optimization plays a large part in overall page load times.
The Balance
In order to optimize your images, you must give up quality or the actual size/dimensions of the image or both. We can compress online graphics and photos while maintaining the actual image dimensions but we lose color and quality. The more compression the less quality. Our job is to find that perfect balance; that acceptable file size while maintaining a quality graphic or picture for your blog or website.
Image File Types
Most website image formats are GIF, JPG or PNG. For today’s comparison I chose to use JPG simply because that is my first choice for online graphics that require no animation or transparency. Many web designers prefer PNG; I recommend creating and optimizing both and choosing the best one for that particular image.
Image Optimization Comparison Test
I started this comparison test by creating a colorful graphic using GIMP Image Manipulation Program, which also has the ability to compress and optimize images. Gimp is not part of this comparison test but is a great product if you are not using Photoshop or another expensive graphic tool; Gimp is free. This original graphic has a file size of 20.772 KB and as you can see it has crisp lines and vivid colors.
Free Online Image Optimization Tools
Today’s comparison test involves three free online image optimization tools.
Site Report Card
Site Report Card’s image reducer tool was fast and efficient, as were all three online graphic compression tools I tested. This test rendered eight separate file sizes to choose from ranging from 2 KB to 10 KB. I selected an acceptable image that was reduced to 5.218 KB (shown below). That is over 75% smaller in file size than the original.
Dynamic Drive
Dynamic Drive’s Optimizer is similar to SiteReportCard’s and generated ten compressed images to choose from. I chose a mid-compression level with a finished file size of 5.856 KB (shown below).
Image Optimizer
Image Optimizer was fast and very easy to use. I selected the ‘normal’ option and was delivered a 6.226 KB JPG image (shown below) and, as you can see, could be used on most websites.
So What’s The Score?
I guess, all in all, it’s a wash. Like I said, compressing an image is a balance between quality and file size. All three online image optimization tools I tested did a great job at reducing file size and the image quality is very close.
Out of the three online image optimization tools, both SiteReportCard and DynamicDrive had a nice selection of compressed images in various file sizes complete with a preview of each. Image Optimizer offered only one selection at a time with no preview but you can download image optimizer on your computer for off line use.
There are many other online image optimization tools available, both online and downloadable programs. Which website or program do you use?
Brian D. Hawkins runs several blogs including HotBlogTips.com where he offers free tips, advice and resources for other bloggers. Follow Brian on Twitter and don’t forget to subscribe to the Hot Blog Tips Newsletter.
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- Three Free Online Image Optimization Tools - August 29, 2011
Amazing tool you shared, for me the best Photoshop alternatives are GIMP and Toolpic – and they’re both free, too. Thanks for sharing such a nice tool.
For me Dynamic drive working good, I’ll also try thee remaining twos you mentioned.
I am using Dynamic Drive to optimize all images I publish on web. I also use bulksmushit wordpress plugin that internally optimize my blog images.
Thanks for sharing and suggesting other web tools in this regards.
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Well interesting Tips for Images Optimization, Finally we have found all the popular online tools which help to optimize images for SEO.
Hafeez Khan would love you to read ..How to Resize All Post Images Automatically in Blogger
I have used Yahoo Smush.it. It does the job just fine. Interesting article though. I will check into these other image optimizers and see if they perform better.
I never knew that image size plays a vital role in one’s page rank. I guess this is part of ON page optimization. Thanks for sharing this information. I just realized that there’s still a lot to learn when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
I’ve used one of your suggested free sites but in downsizing my photographs it blurrs the image when it is a postage stamp. It is hard to balance having enough visual candy (images balnced with text) to keep a reader on the page. I am speaking more of writing poetry than informational or controversial blogging which perhaps need the fast page load and readers may not care about the artistic aspect of the page.
Yes that is precisely right. Also your soon to be readers or visitors would dump your site and not continue to browse thru since you can’t even upload your photos fast enough before they click the back button.
I often use photoshop to optimize images on my site but these free tools seems simpler.
Thank you so much for useful tip.
Nice post, I used photoshop for optimation, but never tried these application, thanks for sharing….
Rebi would love you to read ..Nanoparticle-Based Sensors Used in Cancer Detection
Sharing is what it’s all about, thanks for taking the time to comment.
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Great point on using ipad, that’s the direction we seem to be headed.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
I use image optimizer and was quietly impressed by the service. Will check out other tool as well.
Isha Singh would love you to read ..Banners For Your Facebook Profile
I have never tried image optimization for my site. Will definitely try it out.
Too bad there wasn’t a 80 and 90 percent option on site report card. Some images especially the jpg type get fuzzy in a hurry. I didn’t try png’s though. It is a nice tool and seems fast. I will have to try a few more images when I get a chance. I am sure I’ll find a few that it will work great for.
Ray would love you to read ..How fast does Google index your posts?
Very good information. I haven’t tried these applications. I mainly use photoshop. I recently experimented with GIMP which is free to use and very powerful. I don’t think I will upgrade my photoshop. GIMP would be my alternative. Cool site.
Mr. MakingUsmile
A cool thing about GIMP is you can open and edit photoshop images, even with the layers and transparency intact.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
As rightly said, for optimizing an image you need to get a right balance between file size and picture quality. Your website speed will slow down if you don’t drop the size of the images which you have added to your post. You don’t need expensive graphics editors to compress the sizes of your images, some of them which are listed by the author.
Tried a couple of those, but come on, they can’t compare to Photoshop. That is, if you don’t start comparing Free to Hundreds Of Dollars. In that case i can understand getting by with less than perfect.
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Hi Maria, I’m by no means comparing any of those tools to Photoshop. I just listed three free image optimization tools, not complete graphic design tools.
Honestly, most bloggers and small website owners can not afford and don’t need a professional tool like Photoshop. If I just want to snap a few picks for a niche site should I go and buy a Nikon D7000 camera? Of course not. Photoshop is an awesome graphics tool but it’s very expensive and it has a very large learning curve – to the point that there are collage courses just on using Photoshop. It’s all about need and options.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
Many thanks for sharing your tips. I am impressed and will use these ideas from now onwards. The tools which you have provided are new to me and have bookmarked them for future.
Site load time plays vital role for the ranking of site for some keywords. Ideal load time also invites good traffic for the site. I think these tools are mile stone for image optimization.
That was really a handy post to read and I really wants to say thanks to you for suggesting these tools along with the optimization level. However I liked the Dynamic Drive the most but still according to me I can use them all depending on the level of optimization.
Thanks again.
Thanks Pearl, Dynamic Drive is great.
I have been struggling with images in general on my blog. Sometimes, images are too big, so I have the reduce the size. But, as you mentioned the quality goes down when you do that (in most cases at least).
I had never heard of these sites/tools before. They sound very interesting. I will check them out. Hopefully they are user freindly enough that a non technical person like me could use them as well.
Thanks for the links Brian and Gale.
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Hi Satrap, all three tools are about as user friendly as it gets. That’s one of the best features on all three of them. I hope it helps.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
Thanks for letting us know about these tools. I will definitely try all of them. 🙂
westly would love you to read ..Tips on Kitchen Fire Safety
Having had a film media photographic background, my money is on the resolution of the Image Optimizer for this particular article. The tips to get involved with the demos for graphics illustrations is beneficial. Plenty of time for prep work polishes the tech savvy. Art is so versatile it continues to break all the molds scientifically. Thanks for sharing.
thanks for sharing that awesome tool! this has been more than helpful for me! 🙂
Before, we are all used to doing all the optimization for sites and keywords. Now, even images need optimization. The trends are changing so fast.
Actually Cazzy, I think it’s just the opposite. To me it seems we have a larger window with the faster connection speeds and better browsing tools. When I first started working online all it took was one big picture to stop traffic in it’s tacks.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
I think the widespread use of Photoshop has done a lot in the way of teaching people about optimizing their images; before you save a JPEG, GIF, whatever, Photoshop basically says “Not so fast! What quality would you like?” and calculates the quality/compression vs load-times right there for you in the little window. Just make sure not to go too low b/c most people have a *somewhat* decent connection and we don’t want to see copious amounts of JPEG distortion when surfing the web!!! = )
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Thanks Greg, I haven’t played with Photoshop for a long time. Keep in mind that it’s not just visitor connection speed, it’s about Google too. We can almost always find a decent balance however.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Blogging Success Tips From Extreme John
Hi there!
I’ve already read so many useful tips from you which gave me good ideas to start doing something new or improve my skills. The same is this time, as i will have to try out the GIMP Manipulation Program.
You are right when noticing that compressing an image will always require good balance between the quality and size of the file.
So far, I always used Photoshop-kinda felt most comfortable to deal with it.
Kristina L. would love you to read ..Fandango Coupon Code
Hi Kristina,
You may also want to read my post about doing screen captures using Gimp.
growmap would love you to read ..PageRank Down? How to Improve Site Load Speed
Thanks Kristina, I love GIMP. Another nice free image and photo editing tool is Paint.NET
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
I like the idea of free and help with my websites! thanks!
Dan Honig would love you to read ..Dan Honig
I own a couple of article directories and bandwidth optimization for everything, including and especially images is HUGE in terms of SEO…especially being that Google actually considers load times now.
Great read and thanks for the recommendations Brian…:)
Mark
Mark would love you to read ..Free Onsite WordPress SEO Course
Thanks Mark, I’m glad you took the time to comment.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Blogging Success Tips From Extreme John
Thank you so much for sharing. I am checking all of them!
Not enough webmasters pay attention to optimizing the images on their sites. Even in this day and age, not everyone who visits your site will be on a high speed internet connection – web users are notoriously impatient and will not stick around to see a page load if it takes too long to load. Optimizing your site, especially the images, so that it loads up nice and fast while maintaining quality is a vital skill.
I agree Joe, that’s why I feel information like GrowMap’s last post How to Improve Site Load Speed is so important. It’s a matter of getting the facts out there for every blogger find.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Blazing Minds Tells How She Mastered paper.li
Any suggestions for optimizing photos already on my website? I have several hundred, and reloading them isn’t very appealing. I use Smush.It, but that isn’t doing enough to reduce the size and improve the load times. I am more careful now to use smaller size images, but didn’t know any better at first, so need a way to fix the ones already loaded that are too big.
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Hi Stephanie, Have you tryed Bulk WP Smush.it feature of WP Smush.it? You can find it under the ‘Media’ tab if you have Smush.it installed. I haven’t tried that feature and it says it is an experimental feature so be very careful. Always back-everything up. There may be other plugins available as well.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Blazing Minds Tells How She Mastered paper.li
Hello Brian. I found your ‘balance’ theory the most interesting – wanting optimum size with optimum quality within means. I have recently built a website for a local client and have seen taking images from a smartphone or even a modest digital camera works great if you need big blown up images and the same downsizing it to just a little over a thumbnail.
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Hi Ivin, My smart phone takes better pictures than my older digital camera. At 8mb, it needs a lot of optimizing.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Blazing Minds Tells How She Mastered paper.li
That’s great list of image optimization tools. Thanks for sharing the links to us. Really a nice article for the webmasters.
Thanks Jesica, I appreciate you stopping by.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
“When designing a website or adding images to a blog post, size does matter… file size that is. ” I agree it does matter! Too big images sometimes overpower the content of the blog. So better choose an appropriate size files. Good stuff! Thanks
April would love you to read ..A Recent Pick is Under Contract
Another reason to reduce your photo size is so that power StumbleUpon users can use it to draw attention when they share your content on SU.
growmap would love you to read ..Social Media: Why You MUST Specialize
Good point April, overpowering the content is a great way of putting it.
Dynamic drive has been around forever. Their optimizer is an easy fix for those that don’t have simple photo optimizing software. I admit to rarely waiting around for photos to load when visiting a new blog. This is a most helpful list Brian.
As you said to James, Photoshop has a huge learning curve. I do believe it was built for professionals. My son is a photographer and breezes right through any process. Colors, sizes, and file types optimized for the appropriate purpose.
Have a great week.
redkathy would love you to read ..Cloudflare Is More Than Blog Acceleration & Protection
That’s a great point Kathy, not only is slow page load bad for SEO, it’s bad for keeping the traffic you do get.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Twitter And How It Relates To The Google+ And Facebook Hype
It sounds like Kathy must have a slow Internet connection or older PC. I can’t remember the last time I had to wait for an image to load.
Graphics programs in general and especially Photoshop just make no sense to me and because the how-tos for using them usually speak in graphics terms that mean nothing to me they aren’t much help either. As I’ve often mentioned, I am graphics-challenged.
growmap would love you to read ..Happy Birthday GrowMap 3 Years Old Today
My computer is only a year old and connection broadband. I was thinking in terms of those inexperienced bloggers who upload huge raw images. Perhaps it was inaccurate for me to blame it solely on the image sizes. The combination of huge images, too many widgets, and the loading sequence, especially with blogger blogs, definitely present a wait time.
FYI – A super easy tool for re-sizing images is the Microsoft Office picture manager tool. It won’t change image formats but will resize and compress most.
kathy would love you to read ..Cloudflare Is More Than Blog Acceleration & Protection
Thanks Kathy, I haven’t tried the MS Office picture manager tool yet, I’ll look into it.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
Great tips! I can’t tell you how many times I have asked how to optimize images! You have answered my questions! thanks for yet another informative post!
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You’re welcome Austex, thanks for saying that.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Twitter And How It Relates To The Google+ And Facebook Hype
thank you it’s a very nice site
Hi Noke,
I approved your comment to let you know that comments like yours will almost always be deleted by bloggers. You need to write longer comments that say something SPECIFIC about the post where you leave them so the blogger knows you are not just a spammer.
See the tips for leaving comments in my post about How to Use CommentLuv.
I added anchor text for your link. See my post on How to Use KeywordLuv to understand why that is important.
growmap would love you to read ..Case Study: How to Deal with a Negative Review on Google Places
This makes a nice complementary post to your last post about page loading. I like the side by side comparisons between the programs. To me, it confirms my theory that it doesn’t matter which one you use, if you take the same images and compress them all down to a certain file size, the difference in quality between the smaller files won’t be that significant. The important thing is getting a balance between smaller file size and quality compared to the original.
You are very observant Lionel, that’s actually where the post idea came from.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Twitter And How It Relates To The Google+ And Facebook Hype
These are really great site to reduce the size plus maintain the quality of the image. I’ve been using image optimizer for long time and it works as wonder. Really impressed with it.
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Hi Riya, Did you download Image Optimizer or are you using the online version? Just wondering how the off-line version is.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Twitter And How It Relates To The Google+ And Facebook Hype
Never really gave much thought to properly optimizing my blog in that sort of way.
dan would love you to read ..Hillsborough Movers
Hi Dan, give it some thought, your site speed shows 78% and your Optimize images score shows a D. You have a PR of 2 which isn’t bad but there’s always room for improvement. Check out PageRank Down? How to Improve Site Load Speed if you haven’t already, you might find it helpful.
HotBlogTips would love you to read ..Smart Phones Are Smart For Bloggers
Brian – I have not used these tools before, but I’m intrigued by them. Thanks for the recommendation. I will be checking out sitereportcard.com today.
There are so many great resources available out there – it’s so helpful when people like you suggest the truly great ones to help us weed through the list!
Thanks Tracy, that’s very nice of you. I get a lot of pleasure from posts like these.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Blazing Minds Tells How She Mastered paper.li
Great shares, it is alarming how many organisations think that you need to have photoshop to do anything with images, it seems like companies buy photoshop if their staff simply need to drag some images around a page, most people out there dont have a clue how to use it and getting someone like this a licence is a act of madness!
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Hi James, not to mention the learning curve with Photoshop. I wonder how many hours of overtime they pay for that.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Twitter And How It Relates To The Google+ And Facebook Hype
It’s a common fallacy held by many that the higher the resolution and or file size the better the quality of image. It not only applies to web images but images from digital cameras and the use they are to be put to once taken.
It might be assumed that with the problem might have been more acute in the early days of the web before broadband was the de-facto access technology but that is also a fallacy particularly in the field of SEO.
Google’s whole premise is search relevance and searcher satisfaction and to all intents and purposes appears to be pretty good at achieving that goal.
As such they have indicated that page load times are factored in to the search algorithm and contribute to page rank position.
And, with their recent announcement of the introduction of a new image format, WebP, which is said to losslessly reduce file sizes by another 25% or more, may well play an even bigger part in achieving page 1 rankings in Google.
Time will tell as browser manufacturers take up the challenge and begin to support the new proposed format.
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Hi Zarah,
It is confusing to those new to graphics that the physical dimensions of an image and the amount of storage space it takes and download time are two different things. In other words, that an image can be 2 inches by 2 inches or 125 pixels by 125 pixels and be either huge or small when it comes to download time and storage space required.
That digital cameras default to 3 megs or more is overkill if you never print the photos you take and only plan to view them on a computer, email them, or use them online. I set mine to the lowest resolution so I don’t have to resize them to use them online. That also means I can take far more photos on one storage card.
growmap would love you to read ..Social Media: Why You MUST Specialize
Exactly right, that was one of the challenges of writing this post. I needed to be clear what I meant when I wrote about compressing image size. I didn’t want to confuse anyone so I went with file size.
Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..Blazing Minds Tells How She Mastered paper.li