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Image optimization decreased website's page weight by 62%

315 points by ayoisaiah 8y ago

kawsper 8y ago
If you are using Ruby, I can recommend the image_optim[0] gem together with image_optim_pack (that packs the binaries), it is maintained by a great person I only know by the name of his handle "toy". I used to give him a few dollars per week when Gratipay was still up and running, sadly I don't know of an alternative now. [0] https://github.com/toy/image_optim https://github.com/toy/image_optim
- NHern031 8y ago
  Curious as to what Gratipay was, so I did a little a research. It turns out the maintainers of GratiPay have handed over all assets over to Libreapay[0]. Libreapay appears to be a fork for Gratipay. This might be what you have been looking for! [0] - https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com *I have no affiliation with liberapayn just did some curious research.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Cenk 8y ago
If you’re developing on a Mac, ImageOptim can handle all of the image compression (JPG, PNG, etc): https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac For SVGs, svgo (brew install svgo) usually produces the best results for me.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  I tend to use SVGO’s Missing GUI: https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/ https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/. (Great demonstration of service workers for offline support, too.)
- superrad 8y ago
  I'd second ImageOptim on Mac or PNGGauntlet on Windows https://pnggauntlet.com https://pnggauntlet.com . I'd be careful using pngquant as well, as it will only ever give you 256 or less colour image or your original image back. PNGGauntlet and ImageOptim will optimise your PNGs losslessly.
- bwbw223 8y ago
  svgcleaner is supposed to be faster and have a better compression ratio than svgo: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner It also has a GUI.
  - superhuzza 8y ago
    svgo has a gui online called SVGOMG.
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    svgcleaner looks not to support any lossy compression at this stage. Granted, svgo’s lossy compression is very pathetic, but for many images it will have enormous impact. (I say very pathetic, because it’s pretty much just rounding of numbers to N decimal places—no awareness of perception or how different scales may mean that one decimal place means radically different things in different parts of the image, no path simplifications using Visvalingam-Whyatt or similar, &c.) Being focused on theoretically lossless compression techniques, svgcleaner’s GUI doesn’t look to include rendering of the SVG, and focuses on batch operation. For svgo there is Jake Archibald’s SVGOMG which renders the SVG and so lets you see what the impact of the lossy compression employed.
  - 1996 8y ago
    After fighting with the options, failing to find a good default, and still consistently getting larger images, I fail to see how svgcleaner is better.
    - bwbw223 8y ago
      I think it's only with lossless compression that it's better.
- alexkadis 8y ago
  On Windows, I only need to optimize images occasionally and tend to use the free version of https://kraken.io https://kraken.io There are probably better solutions, but this is very easy and no install needed. On Mac, you're definitely right that ImageOptim is the best.
- kilian 8y ago
  For Linux users I made https://trimage.org https://trimage.org
  - mabynogy 8y ago
    Thanks, I'll try it.
- edko 8y ago
  What would you recommend for an iOS app written in Swift that has to optimize images drag-and-dropped on it by the user?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Because it suits their workflow? Because it adheres to the company's IT policies? Because they like to review results instead of relying on some black box automation? Because they like to work in-house and not on someone else's cloud? Just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a thousand other reasons.
jim-jim-jim 8y ago
Making sure that grayscale/monochrome images are set as such (oftentimes they aren't) can also shave the size down. I use imagemagick for that.
- detritus 8y ago
  This applies to any image will never be seen in its original state - eg. photos that are opacified or dulled down to act as background elements. We had a site outsourced (because I found Shopify to be ..'tricky'.. to meaningfully work with on a PC) and the developer was darkening 'hero' images on the homepage shout in CSS, rather than specifying that we simply pre-process them in something like Photoshop before uploading. When I realised (I wasn't particularly hands on by this point) I was livid, so changed the code and we knocked a few hundred Kb off the front page. Our site is necessarily image heavy, so any gains anywhere are useful. When I first started I had a ceiling limit of about a 120Kb for the entire page - images and all - so today's internet is a weird and foreign land to me.
alberto_ol 8y ago
Optimisation
l5870uoo9y 8y ago
<picture> <source srcset="sample_image.webp" type="image/webp"> <source srcset="sample_image.jpg" type="image/jpg"> <img src="sample_image.jpg" alt=""> </picture> Didn't know you could wrap images in a <picture> tag and browsers (except for IE) will automatically download the .webp version if they support it. Used to do this via a Javascript. I like on-demand scaling where you pass scaling parameters in the url, such as: /200x200/sample_image.jpg.
- mimischi 8y ago
  No need to do on-demand scaling via JavaScript either! The srcset attribute is also available in <img> tags and lets you define differently sized images for different viewports: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Responsive_images https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...
snowwrestler 8y ago
There's some unexamined hooey in this post. For example you can't really compress a JPEG, but you can re-encode it to a lower quality, which can have dramatic effect on the file size. That's what moz2jpeg is doing for this person. But they could have just done the same thing in Photoshop, Preview, MS Office image tool, etc. JPEG is a standard; file size does not depend on what tool you use to create it. It's strictly dependent on the image itself, and the render settings you choose. Same with PNG. In fact, you'll get better quality for the file size if you go directly from the original image straight to your final resolution in one step. Rendering to high-quality JPEG, then re-rendering on the server to shrink the file size, will give you worse image quality than just going straight from the original file to the final in one render. WebP looks promising but is not yet well-supported. Most sites can go a long way just by caring about, testing for, and adjusting image rendering defaults to optimize for file size. EDIT to add a bit more: If you are optimizing images as part of a pre-deploy build process, you can use whatever library you want. The only thing that really matters is your choice of format (JPG or PNG), and the render settings. Or, you can hand-optimize the images and drop them into your repo to deploy as-is. If you're running a CMS where non-developers are going to be uploading images through an admin UI (like Wordpress), your CMS should be using a server-side library to render optimized versions of the images that get uploaded, then serving the optimized versions. You can adjust the settings of the server's image library, although that might require a plugin or module, or custom code, depending on the CMS. Missing this is a common killer mistake in page load times. I visited a site the other day that served a 16 MB JPEG file for the "hero" image on the homepage. My guess it that it was the JPEG straight out of a high-resolution camera. This is also good for user privacy, as the server-side rendering should remove IPTC and EXIF data that would get served with the original image.
- cornstalks 8y ago
  > For example you can't really compress a JPEG You can compress (or rather, optimize) an existing JPEG if the Huffman tables were suboptimal (which they often are). It usually gives a few percentage points of decreased file size. You can also drop metadata (e.g. EXIF) in many circumstances, which saves a bit more.
- tialaramex 8y ago
Atreus 8y ago
Venkatraman Santanam. Made deep learning improve thumbnail representation. Facebook (or google) showed up, gave him a 6 to 8 zeros to the left of the decimal, preceded at the far left by a $ and O(1). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03268.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03268.pdf
yurishimo 8y ago
Cloudinary is another option to get optimized images/videos without having to manually optimize everything. Definitely a good option if you have lots of user uploaded content. Running an optimization script within your app will likely use more resources than it's worth unless you're already operating at scale.
- markc 8y ago
  If you use Akamai's CDN you can get per-browser auto image optimization (size, quality, format) as an add-on service via Image Manager.
acconrad 8y ago
As someone else mentioned, it's much easier to just use ImageOptim if you're on Mac. There's also a CLI and accompanying tool for NPM that includes this and ImageAlpha and JpegMINI: https://www.npmjs.com/package/imageoptim-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/imageoptim-cli But one thing I'd caution is that webp is not a panacea for image optimization. It's only supported in Chrome. If you want to fully leverage next-gen image formats cross browser, you'll also need JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR...and even if you do all of that, you still won't get support for Firefox. There's also srcset and lossy compression, which are also viable options: https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your-sites-performance-now/ https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your...
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  The market fragmentation is why I prefer to use JPEGs more intelligently than authoring multiple versions of the same image for each browser. It feels like the 90s all over again. Using fewer images, smaller images, and caching them has worked well for me.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I'm at the point now where I've realized that nothing is ever the solution all the time. It's a little frustrating. I used to use the rule of thumb that JPEG was for images, and PNG for charts, and things with text. But these days I go through each image I get from the art department and optimize it myself in Photoshop, cycling through a series of presets. To my surprise, depending on the image, sometimes an 8-bit PNG will end up smaller than a JPEG, and provide better visual quality. Naturally, your mileage will vary; at participating locations; not valid in Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico; no cash value; batteries not included; do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Kagerjay 8y ago
I just ran a quick comparison on two big ecommerce sites I'm familiar with. I know for a fact they performed as much optimization as they possible could in their respective file formats Webp and .jpg file both had similar dimensions, picture detail complexity, and dpi. Webp format came out to 50% smaller file size I didn't have enoughof a sampling and/or tests though. I personally don't think image optimization with webp should be a thing though. The lack of native web support is one issue, the next is lack of native support on windows OS is another. Two things IMO are most important about image optimization for heavy-image load sites. One is lazyloading.js (frontend library) via specifying a class for those images past a threshold browser height on the backend. Most notably this is used in many ecommerce sites, but on analysis amazon doesn't seem to be using this. Next would be sprite compression of common social links. A great example of this is amazon actually, checkout this image I extracted from from their webpage. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/gno/sprites/nav-sprite-global_bluebeacon-V3-2x_optimized._CB474516457_.png https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/gno/spri...
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I think with images, just as with videos, there will never be a consensus; some people will insist on certain proprietary formats, forever. At least there's standards now, so that you can provide fallbacks - if you as a website owner would e.g. prefer people use webp because it compresses more than jpg then you can offer both, without forcing one or the other on them. I wouldn't mind a solution on the server-side though, where in your html you just put an img tag and the server determines what the best format is based on browser support. Of course, that would mean there'd be a header (or some smart user agent analysis) for every image request, and you'd like to keep that overhead to a minimum.
amelius 8y ago
> How Image Optimimization decreased my website's page weight by 62% Title needs spellcheck.
- akerr 8y ago
  Would save 3% too.
  - _arvin 8y ago
    $ echo "How Image Optimimization decreased my website's page weight by 62%" | wc -m 67 $ echo "How Image Optimization decreased my website's page weight by 62%" | wc -m 65 $ echo "scale=3; (67-65)/67" | bc .029 Math checks out, sir.
    - sethammons 8y ago
      bc; A new utility I did not know about, thanks! #themoreyouknow
    - amelius 8y ago
      But: $ echo "" | wc -m 1 You probably want to add the -n flag to echo. It doesn't change the validity of the statement though.
Mojah 8y ago
A long time I ago I "automated" the optimization of images on my site by running `optipng` in a cronjob. Every file that touches my server gets optimized. I wrote about it here: https://ma.ttias.be/optimize-size-png-images-automatically-webserver-optipng/ https://ma.ttias.be/optimize-size-png-images-automatically-w... Benefits: - Don't have to think about it - Optipng is really good at reducing PNG's to their bear minimum Downsides: - Doesn't resize images (if a 1024x768 is displayed as a 10x8, it'll still download the 1024x768) - Only does PNG - If your images are stored in git (and you didn't pre-optimize before committing/deploy), you can get merge conflicts Still, better than nothing.
- sotojuan 8y ago
  There’s jpegoptim and imagemagick to resize.
- analogmemory 8y ago
  The node package Sharp does a great job of optimizing images and letting you manipulate them for different sizes, color and channels. http://sharp.pixelplumbing.com http://sharp.pixelplumbing.com
  - davidmurdoch 8y ago
    If using gulp you can use gulp-responsive which uses sharp internally. The automatic cropping methods are pretty cool and work really well, too.
- davnicwil 8y ago
  The git conflicts issue sounds like a perfect usecase for git pre-commit hooks
- Maciej001 8y ago
  I wrote a similar article a while ago, explaining also which sizes work best on retina displays and how to generate all the necessary images easily -> https://www.codecamps.com/responsive-images/ https://www.codecamps.com/responsive-images/ It helped to increase the Google's PageSpeed Insights rating from 56/100 up to 99/100.
jordache 8y ago
is there a robust, automated, and universal process for gauge image optimization result, and comparing it to required image quality level? I've always done it manually and I have a keen sense of image degradations as I increase the compression.
gingerlime 8y ago
I'm a bit surprised there's no mention of image optimization proxy / services like thumbor[0] (which is open source). Instead of pre-processing all your images, it lets you worry about it later. You can compose different transformations and filters (e.g. add a watermark, resize, crop etc). This is especially useful when things on the website change. It lets you keep the original at full size, and transform them as you need. There are some commercial services in this space, as well as other similar open source services. If you're looking for a quick way to get thumbor up and running with docker, I'd plug https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor [0] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Similarly, if you're still living in the past and / or want to maintain your own server instead of pass it through a 3rd party like that or a CDN, a few years ago Google's mod_pagespeed (module / plugin for both apache and nginx) did image optimization and a lot of other optimizations, all transparently - page caching, creating sprites, inlining small images (as base64), above-the-fold CSS optimization, etc. I'd still recommend it if you've an old-fashioned webserver (like idk, random wordpress installation) and don't want to pay a third party. I don't know if it's still being maintained or updated though, I haven't heard much of it since its release.
  - jlg23 8y ago
    > Similarly, if you're still living in the past and / or want to maintain your own server instead of pass it through a 3rd part So, users' privacy is now officially a thing of the past?
  - leeoniya 8y ago
    > Similarly, if you're still living in the past you mean like when privacy was still a thing?
    - briandear 8y ago
      If you have a public-facing site, how is using something like Imgix a privacy issue?
Klathmon 8y ago
If you are using webpack, I highly recommend imagemin-webpack-plugin [0] (although I might be a bit biased as I created it...) It will run a slew of image optimizers by default using imagemin, and has support for a wide range of others. It also supports caching and optimization of images that aren't being directly imported through webpack (thanks to some awesome contributors) so it's a great way to set it and forget it and never have to worry about sending 3mb images to your users by accident. [0] https://github.com/Klathmon/imagemin-webpack-plugin https://github.com/Klathmon/imagemin-webpack-plugin
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  That's a nice one, thanks for sharing! Makes sense for those who already use Webpack
freecodyx 8y ago
we recently moved all our images to s3, we have created some lambda function which compress the images using Guetzli, it's very slow but the results are good.
djhonson196 8y ago
I have been using this plugin in my WordPress website "https://www.globaltechinsights.com/"and https://www.globaltechinsights.com/"and it really works. It has optimized images and reduced the website weight. Plugin name: Smush Image Compression and Optimization.
memelord69 8y ago
I just did convert -strip -quality 40 for a website I had to make
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
I've been using this great imagemagick script for optimizing images the past few years. Works like a charm. Any images that are going to be served from my websites first get optimized via the script. smartresize() { mogrify -path $3 -filter Triangle -define filter:support=2 -thumbnail $2 -unsharp 0.25x0.08+8.3+0.045 -dither None -posterize 136 -quality 82 -define jpeg:fancy-upsampling=off -define png:compression-filter=5 -define png:compression-level=9 -define png:compression-strategy=1 -define png:exclude-chunk=all -interlace none -colorspace sRGB $1 } Usage: smartresize image.png 300 outdir/ Looks like I must have found it here https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/efficient-image-resizing-with-imagemagick/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/efficient-image-res...
- mabynogy 8y ago
  Thanks. I noticed a gain of 20% on my images with this method.
nicolasbistolfi 8y ago
I personally have been working around web technologies and performance for the last 14 years. I understand where this article is coming from and I actually have to give it some credit, it has a good click-bait title but it's an old solution. I'm tired of reading about this type of solutions, there are thousands of articles exactly like this one. Reducing the size of your images is just the first step and there are many things you need to consider in order to make your website faster, things you need to solve: - Format: deliver the images in the right format for each browser (e.g. using WebP for Chrome) - Size: What size for each image? What happens on mobile, tablet, desktop and the different screen sizes and pixel ratios (it's not only retina or not) - Quality: Is your image being resized by the browser? Are you using raw files to generate the optimized images? - Thumbnails: Are you also generating thumbnails for listings or smaller versions of your images? How are you going those thumbs to your original images? Do you need to use a Database? - Storage: Where are you going to store those images? - Headers: Caching static assets it's key for recurrent users, are you using Apache or Nginx? Is your setup working well? - CDN: are you using a CDN to deliver those assets? CloudFlare is great but it's not the fastest way to deliver images. What about setting the right configuration for that CDN? How much are you going to spend? So what's next? Going to one of the API service to optimize images, read their 500 pages of docs to get to resize and crop an image? Ad complex plugins to your backend and have a high dependence integration? I mean, if you like to add more dependencies to your project, maintain more code, spends hours rebuilding scripts and running cron jobs to update your images, go for it. That's why about 9 months ago we started working on a new concept, solving all these problems with a service that integrates as easy as a lazy-loading plugin and it solves EVERYTHING about image optimization (and yes, everything that you're talking about on every comment on this HN post). Don't get me wrong, we have a lot to improve and there are many details of our product that we need to polish, but we believe we've built a solution that solves perfectly all the most important parts of image optimization and delivery. It's not about reducing the image size by 1KB more, it's about everything else and understanding the big picture. We love feedback and our backlog is prioritized based on our customer needs, let us know what you think. Here's the link to our startup website: https://piio.co https://piio.co
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  Author here. Thanks for the feedback. I agree that what I've done is nothing revolutionary, but the vast majority of websites out there don't have these sort of thing. That's one of the reasons why the average page weight continues to grow every year [0]. Moreover, this solution is good enough for people with small blogs just like mine. Anyone who needs something more involved can use your service or other alternatives. As for responsive images, I implemented that on my site too although I didn't mention it in the article. I plan to write a follow up article on that topic soon. On a side note, you might want to bump up the font size of the navigation links on your site. They're too faint. [0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
greysteil 8y ago
One of the nicest additions to the GitHub Marketplace is a bot that will optimise your images automatically: https://github.com/marketplace/imgbot https://github.com/marketplace/imgbot (No connection to me - just think it's a great idea, and totally free.)
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  Another GitHub bot[0] was shared earlier. This one looks similar. Thanks for sharing! [0]: https://www.shrink.sh/ https://www.shrink.sh/
Xt-6 8y ago
After seeing people forgetting to do basic optimization step on images at our respective jobs, a friend and I build https://www.shrink.sh https://www.shrink.sh. The goal this tool is to create a catch all system. It also prevent you from installing some tools that will slow even more build or deploys and that you would need to maintain forever.
calyth2018 8y ago
Setup metrics that you'd like to hit for your pages. When I was a kid putting up a fan site for games, (back on Geocities), I was mostly stuck on a 28.8k modem, and aimed to have it finish loading in 30s. Now, I was quite brutal in the compression and probably should have backed off a bit to avoid artifacts. It might be nice to have an automated test that the system under test limits the bandwidth and try to load your pages, and set some times that you'd like to hit.
Theodores 8y ago
There are better ways that place usability first. By usability this means that there is nothing for the content creator to do and nothing for the frontend developer to do. I use mod_pagespeed - there are versions for nginx and Apache that do all of the heavy lifting. With mod_pagespeed you can get all of the src_set images at sensible compression levels. All you need is to markup your code with width= and height= values for each img. With this in place the client can upload multi-megabyte images from their camera without having to fiddle in Photoshop etc. It just works and the hard part is abstracted out to mod_pagespeed. By taking this approach there is no need to use fancy build tools. However, a background script to 'mogrify' your source images is a nice complement to mod_pagespeed, if you want your images to be in Google Image Search then 1920x1080 is what you need. The really good thing about taking the mod_pagespeed route is that you do get 'infinite zoom' on mobile, e.g. pinch and zoom and it fills in the next src_set size. Keep going and you eventually get the original, which you have background converted to 1920x1080. There is also the option to optimise image perceptually, so you are not just mashing everything down to 70% (or 84%). On your local development box you can run without mod_pagespeed and just have the full resolution images. Or you can experiment with more advanced features such as lazy_loading - this also comes for free with mod_pagespeed. If you want your images to line up in nice squares then you might add in whitespace to the images. Maybe taking time in Photoshop to do this. However, it is easier to just 'identify' the image height/widths and to set something sensible for them, keeping the aspect ratio correct. Then you can use modern CSS to align them in figure elements to then let mod_pagespeed fill out the src_sets. Icons and other images that are needed are best manually tweaked into cut down SVG files and then put into CSS as data URLs, thereby reducing a whole load of extra requests (even if it is just one for a fiddly 'sprite sheet'). Oh, a final tweak, if you are running a script to optimise uploaded images and to restrict max size then you can also use 4:2:0 colour sampling. This is where the image still has the dots but the colours are 'halved in resolution'. This is not noticeable in a lot of use cases and particularly good if you are using PNGs to get that transparency. As mentioned, mod_pagespeed reduced project complexity by offloading the hard work to the server, keeping cruft out of the project and making the build tools out of the way. It can also be covered to inline some images and plenty else to get really good performance. Mileage may vary if the decision has been made to use a CDN where such functionality is not possible. However, if serving a local market then a faux CDN is pretty good, i.e. a static domain on HTTP2 where the cache is set properly and no cookies are sent up/down the wire to get every image. https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-optimize https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-optimize https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-responsive https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-responsive
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Sometimes I visit a project and drop all public images (logos, icons, stock photos, whatever) in the project in imageoptim. 75% reduction in file-size for some images is not uncommon.
Adamantcheese 8y ago
Another option, if your images are simple enough, is to use https://github.com/fogleman/primitive https://github.com/fogleman/primitive to convert it to SVG. Might not be worth the effort though as the space savings could be too insignificant to matter for the artifacts produced. Neat effect though for small amounts of shapes.
- rectangletangle 8y ago
  Another approach is to design the site with SVGs as the priority format. Use flat cartoon like graphics in place of JPG photographs, whenever possible.
harias 8y ago
2016 Google developers conference had something on this : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LpCi6DQME https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LpCi6DQME
adityapatadia 8y ago
We at Gumlet also provide image optimisation which just works: https://www.gumlet.com https://www.gumlet.com It's also accompanied by client side javascript library: http://github.com/gumlet/gumlet.js http://github.com/gumlet/gumlet.js
vladdanilov 8y ago
This article like many others is full of fallacies. Image formats are not used wisely: [1] is PNG not JPEG and [2] is JPEG not PNG. > I found that setting quality (mozjpeg) to 70 produces good enough images for the most part, but your mileage may vary. You can get away with this setting for hidpi sizes but 1x will look horrible [1]. If you care about quality, the mileage is actually 75-95. > (Pngquant) quality level of 65-80 to provide a good compromise between file size and image quality Again, it may only be applied to hidpi sizes, and it will easily ruin any gradients or previously quantized images. Pngquant is a great color quantization tool but it does not actually perform any lossless PNG optimizations, which can save you at least 5% more, and up to 90% in some cases. All of these tools will also blindly strip metadata (but it's not guaranteed!) along with color profiles and Exif Orientation resulting in color shifts and image transformations respectively. Most importantly, none of them are good enough for automatic lossy compression. Guetzli is the closest but it still has some severe issues [3]. I'm also trying to build a real thing, and it is hard. > there’s value in using WebP formats where possible WebP lossless and WebP lossy are quite different formats. WebP lossy being always 4:2:0 is not a good replacement for JPEG [4] especially at higher quality. On the contrary WebP lossless has evolved into a decent alternative for PNG including lossy [5]. Proper responsive images would give you considerably smaller page weight and improve performance on mobile devices. BTW Google treats oversized images as unoptimized [6]. [1] https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/http-status-codes/everything-ok-683.jpg https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/http-status-codes/e... [2] https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/articles/freshman-1600-original.png https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/articles/freshman-1... [3] https://github.com/google/guetzli/issues https://github.com/google/guetzli/issues [4] https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07/15/mozilla-advances-jpeg-encoding-with-mozjpeg-2-0/ https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07/15/mozilla-advances-jpe... [5] https://twitter.com/jyzg/status/958629795692150790 https://twitter.com/jyzg/status/958629795692150790 [6] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffreshman.tech&tab=desktop https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
molotovbliss 8y ago
https://github.com/DarthSim/imgproxy/ https://github.com/DarthSim/imgproxy/ imgproxy I've not seen mentioned, it is probably the fastest image processing I've used yet. It uses libvips, https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/wiki/HOWTO----Image-shrinking https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/wiki/HOWTO----Image-shrin... which not only handles resizing & other basic img needs but optimizes on top of being very light weight on memory & CPU cycles compared to most other implementations.
Bluecobra 8y ago
Coincidentally, when I was a freshman in high school in the late 90's this was a topic our instructor drilled into us. I remember trying to shave off every little kilobyte for .gif and .jpg files and to make my personal website load as quickly as possible with a reasonable amount of quality over a modem. From my perspective, it seems that everything has gotten way more bloated there is an assumption that everyone has unlimited data and bandwidth. I used to have a 1GB data cap on my phone that I would blow out in a couple of weeks from just reading news websites. For example, bloomberg.com shouldn't need to make nearly ~300 requests and download 18mb of data just to load the front page.
- MR4D 8y ago
  Your comment made me bring out DevTools, because I thought your number of requests you said ("~300") sounded a bit high. Boy was I wrong!!! - 500/565 requests - 7.0 MB transferred - 9.86 second to load Holy crap!!!
  - Jach 8y ago
    "Install our app!"
    - jakecopp 8y ago
      Try dailytelegraph.com.au for a good shock! On mobile, but last I checked was around 700 HTTP requests on a desktop without adblock.
      - adventured 8y ago
        Checked it on Pingdom, from Melbourne, it failed after one minute of trying to load, with 585 requests and 3.4mb. I always find it difficult to imagine what kind of process leads to that result. The developers can't be happy about it, surely. It has to be a case where management and everyone else throws things they want into the project, a big concensus party, and you end up with a bloated monster at the end.
partiallypro 8y ago
I use Kraken on every site I do for this reason.
stereo 8y ago
You can save another 7.6% on that png by passing it through advpng+pngout. ImageOptim is fantastic for this: https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac
chrisparton1991 8y ago
For one of my websites (a static page with some pretties), I challenged myself to remove as much cruft as possible without degrading the experience. I used Fontello to strip out unnecessary FontAwesome icons and uncss to remove unused Bootstrap styles, replaced some Bootstrap JS with vanilla JS and made use of SVGs (optimised with SVGOMG) for backgrounds and the logo. The resulting site is a total of 178Kb when viewed in Chrome (down from over 1MB), including bootstrap, analytics, some screenshots, a custom font and animated logo. There's plenty more I could do to trim off size, but I had more important things to do. There are so many ways to make webpages smaller and more efficient, and it can be a really fun learning experience.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
Hate to ask a dumb question but What are the best tools/strategies to optimize images?

315 points by ayoisaiah 8y ago

If you are using Ruby, I can recommend the image_optim[0] gem together with image_optim_pack (that packs the binaries), it is maintained by a great person I only know by the name of his handle "toy". I used to give him a few dollars per week when Gratipay was still up and running, sadly I don't know of an alternative now. [0] https://github.com/toy/image_optim https://github.com/toy/image_optim

NHern031 8y ago
Curious as to what Gratipay was, so I did a little a research. It turns out the maintainers of GratiPay have handed over all assets over to Libreapay[0]. Libreapay appears to be a fork for Gratipay. This might be what you have been looking for! [0] - https://liberapay.com https://liberapay.com *I have no affiliation with liberapayn just did some curious research.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Cenk 8y ago

If you’re developing on a Mac, ImageOptim can handle all of the image compression (JPG, PNG, etc): https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac For SVGs, svgo (brew install svgo) usually produces the best results for me.

chrismorgan 8y ago
I tend to use SVGO’s Missing GUI: https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/ https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/. (Great demonstration of service workers for offline support, too.)
superrad 8y ago
I'd second ImageOptim on Mac or PNGGauntlet on Windows https://pnggauntlet.com https://pnggauntlet.com . I'd be careful using pngquant as well, as it will only ever give you 256 or less colour image or your original image back. PNGGauntlet and ImageOptim will optimise your PNGs losslessly.
bwbw223 8y ago
svgcleaner is supposed to be faster and have a better compression ratio than svgo: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner It also has a GUI.
- superhuzza 8y ago
  svgo has a gui online called SVGOMG.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  svgcleaner looks not to support any lossy compression at this stage. Granted, svgo’s lossy compression is very pathetic, but for many images it will have enormous impact. (I say very pathetic, because it’s pretty much just rounding of numbers to N decimal places—no awareness of perception or how different scales may mean that one decimal place means radically different things in different parts of the image, no path simplifications using Visvalingam-Whyatt or similar, &c.) Being focused on theoretically lossless compression techniques, svgcleaner’s GUI doesn’t look to include rendering of the SVG, and focuses on batch operation. For svgo there is Jake Archibald’s SVGOMG which renders the SVG and so lets you see what the impact of the lossy compression employed.
- 1996 8y ago
  After fighting with the options, failing to find a good default, and still consistently getting larger images, I fail to see how svgcleaner is better.
  - bwbw223 8y ago
    I think it's only with lossless compression that it's better.
alexkadis 8y ago
On Windows, I only need to optimize images occasionally and tend to use the free version of https://kraken.io https://kraken.io There are probably better solutions, but this is very easy and no install needed. On Mac, you're definitely right that ImageOptim is the best.
kilian 8y ago
For Linux users I made https://trimage.org https://trimage.org
- mabynogy 8y ago
  Thanks, I'll try it.
edko 8y ago
What would you recommend for an iOS app written in Swift that has to optimize images drag-and-dropped on it by the user?
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Because it suits their workflow? Because it adheres to the company's IT policies? Because they like to review results instead of relying on some black box automation? Because they like to work in-house and not on someone else's cloud? Just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a thousand other reasons.

jim-jim-jim 8y ago

Making sure that grayscale/monochrome images are set as such (oftentimes they aren't) can also shave the size down. I use imagemagick for that.

detritus 8y ago
This applies to any image will never be seen in its original state - eg. photos that are opacified or dulled down to act as background elements. We had a site outsourced (because I found Shopify to be ..'tricky'.. to meaningfully work with on a PC) and the developer was darkening 'hero' images on the homepage shout in CSS, rather than specifying that we simply pre-process them in something like Photoshop before uploading. When I realised (I wasn't particularly hands on by this point) I was livid, so changed the code and we knocked a few hundred Kb off the front page. Our site is necessarily image heavy, so any gains anywhere are useful. When I first started I had a ceiling limit of about a 120Kb for the entire page - images and all - so today's internet is a weird and foreign land to me.

alberto_ol 8y ago

Optimisation

l5870uoo9y 8y ago

<picture> <source srcset="sample_image.webp" type="image/webp"> <source srcset="sample_image.jpg" type="image/jpg"> <img src="sample_image.jpg" alt=""> </picture> Didn't know you could wrap images in a <picture> tag and browsers (except for IE) will automatically download the .webp version if they support it. Used to do this via a Javascript. I like on-demand scaling where you pass scaling parameters in the url, such as: /200x200/sample_image.jpg.

mimischi 8y ago
No need to do on-demand scaling via JavaScript either! The srcset attribute is also available in <img> tags and lets you define differently sized images for different viewports: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Responsive_images https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...

snowwrestler 8y ago

There's some unexamined hooey in this post. For example you can't really compress a JPEG, but you can re-encode it to a lower quality, which can have dramatic effect on the file size. That's what moz2jpeg is doing for this person. But they could have just done the same thing in Photoshop, Preview, MS Office image tool, etc. JPEG is a standard; file size does not depend on what tool you use to create it. It's strictly dependent on the image itself, and the render settings you choose. Same with PNG. In fact, you'll get better quality for the file size if you go directly from the original image straight to your final resolution in one step. Rendering to high-quality JPEG, then re-rendering on the server to shrink the file size, will give you worse image quality than just going straight from the original file to the final in one render. WebP looks promising but is not yet well-supported. Most sites can go a long way just by caring about, testing for, and adjusting image rendering defaults to optimize for file size. EDIT to add a bit more: If you are optimizing images as part of a pre-deploy build process, you can use whatever library you want. The only thing that really matters is your choice of format (JPG or PNG), and the render settings. Or, you can hand-optimize the images and drop them into your repo to deploy as-is. If you're running a CMS where non-developers are going to be uploading images through an admin UI (like Wordpress), your CMS should be using a server-side library to render optimized versions of the images that get uploaded, then serving the optimized versions. You can adjust the settings of the server's image library, although that might require a plugin or module, or custom code, depending on the CMS. Missing this is a common killer mistake in page load times. I visited a site the other day that served a 16 MB JPEG file for the "hero" image on the homepage. My guess it that it was the JPEG straight out of a high-resolution camera. This is also good for user privacy, as the server-side rendering should remove IPTC and EXIF data that would get served with the original image.

cornstalks 8y ago
> For example you can't really compress a JPEG You can compress (or rather, optimize) an existing JPEG if the Huffman tables were suboptimal (which they often are). It usually gives a few percentage points of decreased file size. You can also drop metadata (e.g. EXIF) in many circumstances, which saves a bit more.
tialaramex 8y ago

Atreus 8y ago

Venkatraman Santanam. Made deep learning improve thumbnail representation. Facebook (or google) showed up, gave him a 6 to 8 zeros to the left of the decimal, preceded at the far left by a $ and O(1). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03268.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03268.pdf

yurishimo 8y ago

Cloudinary is another option to get optimized images/videos without having to manually optimize everything. Definitely a good option if you have lots of user uploaded content. Running an optimization script within your app will likely use more resources than it's worth unless you're already operating at scale.

markc 8y ago
If you use Akamai's CDN you can get per-browser auto image optimization (size, quality, format) as an add-on service via Image Manager.

acconrad 8y ago

As someone else mentioned, it's much easier to just use ImageOptim if you're on Mac. There's also a CLI and accompanying tool for NPM that includes this and ImageAlpha and JpegMINI: https://www.npmjs.com/package/imageoptim-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/imageoptim-cli But one thing I'd caution is that webp is not a panacea for image optimization. It's only supported in Chrome. If you want to fully leverage next-gen image formats cross browser, you'll also need JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR...and even if you do all of that, you still won't get support for Firefox. There's also srcset and lossy compression, which are also viable options: https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your-sites-performance-now/ https://userinterfacing.com/the-fastest-way-to-increase-your...

theandrewbailey 8y ago
The market fragmentation is why I prefer to use JPEGs more intelligently than authoring multiple versions of the same image for each browser. It feels like the 90s all over again. Using fewer images, smaller images, and caching them has worked well for me.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I'm at the point now where I've realized that nothing is ever the solution all the time. It's a little frustrating. I used to use the rule of thumb that JPEG was for images, and PNG for charts, and things with text. But these days I go through each image I get from the art department and optimize it myself in Photoshop, cycling through a series of presets. To my surprise, depending on the image, sometimes an 8-bit PNG will end up smaller than a JPEG, and provide better visual quality. Naturally, your mileage will vary; at participating locations; not valid in Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico; no cash value; batteries not included; do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Kagerjay 8y ago

I just ran a quick comparison on two big ecommerce sites I'm familiar with. I know for a fact they performed as much optimization as they possible could in their respective file formats Webp and .jpg file both had similar dimensions, picture detail complexity, and dpi. Webp format came out to 50% smaller file size I didn't have enoughof a sampling and/or tests though. I personally don't think image optimization with webp should be a thing though. The lack of native web support is one issue, the next is lack of native support on windows OS is another. Two things IMO are most important about image optimization for heavy-image load sites. One is lazyloading.js (frontend library) via specifying a class for those images past a threshold browser height on the backend. Most notably this is used in many ecommerce sites, but on analysis amazon doesn't seem to be using this. Next would be sprite compression of common social links. A great example of this is amazon actually, checkout this image I extracted from from their webpage. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/gno/sprites/nav-sprite-global_bluebeacon-V3-2x_optimized._CB474516457_.png https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/gno/spri...

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I think with images, just as with videos, there will never be a consensus; some people will insist on certain proprietary formats, forever. At least there's standards now, so that you can provide fallbacks - if you as a website owner would e.g. prefer people use webp because it compresses more than jpg then you can offer both, without forcing one or the other on them. I wouldn't mind a solution on the server-side though, where in your html you just put an img tag and the server determines what the best format is based on browser support. Of course, that would mean there'd be a header (or some smart user agent analysis) for every image request, and you'd like to keep that overhead to a minimum.

amelius 8y ago

> How Image Optimimization decreased my website's page weight by 62% Title needs spellcheck.

akerr 8y ago
Would save 3% too.
- _arvin 8y ago
  $ echo "How Image Optimimization decreased my website's page weight by 62%" | wc -m 67 $ echo "How Image Optimization decreased my website's page weight by 62%" | wc -m 65 $ echo "scale=3; (67-65)/67" | bc .029 Math checks out, sir.
  - sethammons 8y ago
    bc; A new utility I did not know about, thanks! #themoreyouknow
  - amelius 8y ago
    But: $ echo "" | wc -m 1 You probably want to add the -n flag to echo. It doesn't change the validity of the statement though.

Mojah 8y ago

A long time I ago I "automated" the optimization of images on my site by running `optipng` in a cronjob. Every file that touches my server gets optimized. I wrote about it here: https://ma.ttias.be/optimize-size-png-images-automatically-webserver-optipng/ https://ma.ttias.be/optimize-size-png-images-automatically-w... Benefits: - Don't have to think about it - Optipng is really good at reducing PNG's to their bear minimum Downsides: - Doesn't resize images (if a 1024x768 is displayed as a 10x8, it'll still download the 1024x768) - Only does PNG - If your images are stored in git (and you didn't pre-optimize before committing/deploy), you can get merge conflicts Still, better than nothing.

sotojuan 8y ago
There’s jpegoptim and imagemagick to resize.
analogmemory 8y ago
The node package Sharp does a great job of optimizing images and letting you manipulate them for different sizes, color and channels. http://sharp.pixelplumbing.com http://sharp.pixelplumbing.com
- davidmurdoch 8y ago
  If using gulp you can use gulp-responsive which uses sharp internally. The automatic cropping methods are pretty cool and work really well, too.
davnicwil 8y ago
The git conflicts issue sounds like a perfect usecase for git pre-commit hooks
Maciej001 8y ago
I wrote a similar article a while ago, explaining also which sizes work best on retina displays and how to generate all the necessary images easily -> https://www.codecamps.com/responsive-images/ https://www.codecamps.com/responsive-images/ It helped to increase the Google's PageSpeed Insights rating from 56/100 up to 99/100.

jordache 8y ago

is there a robust, automated, and universal process for gauge image optimization result, and comparing it to required image quality level? I've always done it manually and I have a keen sense of image degradations as I increase the compression.

gingerlime 8y ago

I'm a bit surprised there's no mention of image optimization proxy / services like thumbor[0] (which is open source). Instead of pre-processing all your images, it lets you worry about it later. You can compose different transformations and filters (e.g. add a watermark, resize, crop etc). This is especially useful when things on the website change. It lets you keep the original at full size, and transform them as you need. There are some commercial services in this space, as well as other similar open source services. If you're looking for a quick way to get thumbor up and running with docker, I'd plug https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor https://github.com/minimalcompact/thumbor [0] https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Similarly, if you're still living in the past and / or want to maintain your own server instead of pass it through a 3rd party like that or a CDN, a few years ago Google's mod_pagespeed (module / plugin for both apache and nginx) did image optimization and a lot of other optimizations, all transparently - page caching, creating sprites, inlining small images (as base64), above-the-fold CSS optimization, etc. I'd still recommend it if you've an old-fashioned webserver (like idk, random wordpress installation) and don't want to pay a third party. I don't know if it's still being maintained or updated though, I haven't heard much of it since its release.
- jlg23 8y ago
  > Similarly, if you're still living in the past and / or want to maintain your own server instead of pass it through a 3rd part So, users' privacy is now officially a thing of the past?
- leeoniya 8y ago
  > Similarly, if you're still living in the past you mean like when privacy was still a thing?
  - briandear 8y ago
    If you have a public-facing site, how is using something like Imgix a privacy issue?

Klathmon 8y ago

If you are using webpack, I highly recommend imagemin-webpack-plugin [0] (although I might be a bit biased as I created it...) It will run a slew of image optimizers by default using imagemin, and has support for a wide range of others. It also supports caching and optimization of images that aren't being directly imported through webpack (thanks to some awesome contributors) so it's a great way to set it and forget it and never have to worry about sending 3mb images to your users by accident. [0] https://github.com/Klathmon/imagemin-webpack-plugin https://github.com/Klathmon/imagemin-webpack-plugin

ayoisaiah 8y ago
That's a nice one, thanks for sharing! Makes sense for those who already use Webpack

freecodyx 8y ago

we recently moved all our images to s3, we have created some lambda function which compress the images using Guetzli, it's very slow but the results are good.

djhonson196 8y ago

I have been using this plugin in my WordPress website "https://www.globaltechinsights.com/"and https://www.globaltechinsights.com/"and it really works. It has optimized images and reduced the website weight. Plugin name: Smush Image Compression and Optimization.

memelord69 8y ago

I just did convert -strip -quality 40 for a website I had to make

mcjiggerlog 8y ago

I've been using this great imagemagick script for optimizing images the past few years. Works like a charm. Any images that are going to be served from my websites first get optimized via the script. smartresize() { mogrify -path $3 -filter Triangle -define filter:support=2 -thumbnail $2 -unsharp 0.25x0.08+8.3+0.045 -dither None -posterize 136 -quality 82 -define jpeg:fancy-upsampling=off -define png:compression-filter=5 -define png:compression-level=9 -define png:compression-strategy=1 -define png:exclude-chunk=all -interlace none -colorspace sRGB $1 } Usage: smartresize image.png 300 outdir/ Looks like I must have found it here https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/efficient-image-resizing-with-imagemagick/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/efficient-image-res...

mabynogy 8y ago
Thanks. I noticed a gain of 20% on my images with this method.

nicolasbistolfi 8y ago

I personally have been working around web technologies and performance for the last 14 years. I understand where this article is coming from and I actually have to give it some credit, it has a good click-bait title but it's an old solution. I'm tired of reading about this type of solutions, there are thousands of articles exactly like this one. Reducing the size of your images is just the first step and there are many things you need to consider in order to make your website faster, things you need to solve: - Format: deliver the images in the right format for each browser (e.g. using WebP for Chrome) - Size: What size for each image? What happens on mobile, tablet, desktop and the different screen sizes and pixel ratios (it's not only retina or not) - Quality: Is your image being resized by the browser? Are you using raw files to generate the optimized images? - Thumbnails: Are you also generating thumbnails for listings or smaller versions of your images? How are you going those thumbs to your original images? Do you need to use a Database? - Storage: Where are you going to store those images? - Headers: Caching static assets it's key for recurrent users, are you using Apache or Nginx? Is your setup working well? - CDN: are you using a CDN to deliver those assets? CloudFlare is great but it's not the fastest way to deliver images. What about setting the right configuration for that CDN? How much are you going to spend? So what's next? Going to one of the API service to optimize images, read their 500 pages of docs to get to resize and crop an image? Ad complex plugins to your backend and have a high dependence integration? I mean, if you like to add more dependencies to your project, maintain more code, spends hours rebuilding scripts and running cron jobs to update your images, go for it. That's why about 9 months ago we started working on a new concept, solving all these problems with a service that integrates as easy as a lazy-loading plugin and it solves EVERYTHING about image optimization (and yes, everything that you're talking about on every comment on this HN post). Don't get me wrong, we have a lot to improve and there are many details of our product that we need to polish, but we believe we've built a solution that solves perfectly all the most important parts of image optimization and delivery. It's not about reducing the image size by 1KB more, it's about everything else and understanding the big picture. We love feedback and our backlog is prioritized based on our customer needs, let us know what you think. Here's the link to our startup website: https://piio.co https://piio.co

ayoisaiah 8y ago
Author here. Thanks for the feedback. I agree that what I've done is nothing revolutionary, but the vast majority of websites out there don't have these sort of thing. That's one of the reasons why the average page weight continues to grow every year [0]. Moreover, this solution is good enough for people with small blogs just like mine. Anyone who needs something more involved can use your service or other alternatives. As for responsive images, I implemented that on my site too although I didn't mention it in the article. I plan to write a follow up article on that topic soon. On a side note, you might want to bump up the font size of the navigation links on your site. They're too faint. [0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

greysteil 8y ago

One of the nicest additions to the GitHub Marketplace is a bot that will optimise your images automatically: https://github.com/marketplace/imgbot https://github.com/marketplace/imgbot (No connection to me - just think it's a great idea, and totally free.)

ayoisaiah 8y ago
Another GitHub bot[0] was shared earlier. This one looks similar. Thanks for sharing! [0]: https://www.shrink.sh/ https://www.shrink.sh/

Xt-6 8y ago

After seeing people forgetting to do basic optimization step on images at our respective jobs, a friend and I build https://www.shrink.sh https://www.shrink.sh. The goal this tool is to create a catch all system. It also prevent you from installing some tools that will slow even more build or deploys and that you would need to maintain forever.

calyth2018 8y ago

Setup metrics that you'd like to hit for your pages. When I was a kid putting up a fan site for games, (back on Geocities), I was mostly stuck on a 28.8k modem, and aimed to have it finish loading in 30s. Now, I was quite brutal in the compression and probably should have backed off a bit to avoid artifacts. It might be nice to have an automated test that the system under test limits the bandwidth and try to load your pages, and set some times that you'd like to hit.

Theodores 8y ago

There are better ways that place usability first. By usability this means that there is nothing for the content creator to do and nothing for the frontend developer to do. I use mod_pagespeed - there are versions for nginx and Apache that do all of the heavy lifting. With mod_pagespeed you can get all of the src_set images at sensible compression levels. All you need is to markup your code with width= and height= values for each img. With this in place the client can upload multi-megabyte images from their camera without having to fiddle in Photoshop etc. It just works and the hard part is abstracted out to mod_pagespeed. By taking this approach there is no need to use fancy build tools. However, a background script to 'mogrify' your source images is a nice complement to mod_pagespeed, if you want your images to be in Google Image Search then 1920x1080 is what you need. The really good thing about taking the mod_pagespeed route is that you do get 'infinite zoom' on mobile, e.g. pinch and zoom and it fills in the next src_set size. Keep going and you eventually get the original, which you have background converted to 1920x1080. There is also the option to optimise image perceptually, so you are not just mashing everything down to 70% (or 84%). On your local development box you can run without mod_pagespeed and just have the full resolution images. Or you can experiment with more advanced features such as lazy_loading - this also comes for free with mod_pagespeed. If you want your images to line up in nice squares then you might add in whitespace to the images. Maybe taking time in Photoshop to do this. However, it is easier to just 'identify' the image height/widths and to set something sensible for them, keeping the aspect ratio correct. Then you can use modern CSS to align them in figure elements to then let mod_pagespeed fill out the src_sets. Icons and other images that are needed are best manually tweaked into cut down SVG files and then put into CSS as data URLs, thereby reducing a whole load of extra requests (even if it is just one for a fiddly 'sprite sheet'). Oh, a final tweak, if you are running a script to optimise uploaded images and to restrict max size then you can also use 4:2:0 colour sampling. This is where the image still has the dots but the colours are 'halved in resolution'. This is not noticeable in a lot of use cases and particularly good if you are using PNGs to get that transparency. As mentioned, mod_pagespeed reduced project complexity by offloading the hard work to the server, keeping cruft out of the project and making the build tools out of the way. It can also be covered to inline some images and plenty else to get really good performance. Mileage may vary if the decision has been made to use a CDN where such functionality is not possible. However, if serving a local market then a faux CDN is pretty good, i.e. a static domain on HTTP2 where the cache is set properly and no cookies are sent up/down the wire to get every image. https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-optimize https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-optimize https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-responsive https://www.modpagespeed.com/doc/filter-image-responsive

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

Sometimes I visit a project and drop all public images (logos, icons, stock photos, whatever) in the project in imageoptim. 75% reduction in file-size for some images is not uncommon.

Adamantcheese 8y ago

Another option, if your images are simple enough, is to use https://github.com/fogleman/primitive https://github.com/fogleman/primitive to convert it to SVG. Might not be worth the effort though as the space savings could be too insignificant to matter for the artifacts produced. Neat effect though for small amounts of shapes.

rectangletangle 8y ago
Another approach is to design the site with SVGs as the priority format. Use flat cartoon like graphics in place of JPG photographs, whenever possible.

harias 8y ago

2016 Google developers conference had something on this : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LpCi6DQME https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LpCi6DQME

adityapatadia 8y ago

We at Gumlet also provide image optimisation which just works: https://www.gumlet.com https://www.gumlet.com It's also accompanied by client side javascript library: http://github.com/gumlet/gumlet.js http://github.com/gumlet/gumlet.js

vladdanilov 8y ago

This article like many others is full of fallacies. Image formats are not used wisely: [1] is PNG not JPEG and [2] is JPEG not PNG. > I found that setting quality (mozjpeg) to 70 produces good enough images for the most part, but your mileage may vary. You can get away with this setting for hidpi sizes but 1x will look horrible [1]. If you care about quality, the mileage is actually 75-95. > (Pngquant) quality level of 65-80 to provide a good compromise between file size and image quality Again, it may only be applied to hidpi sizes, and it will easily ruin any gradients or previously quantized images. Pngquant is a great color quantization tool but it does not actually perform any lossless PNG optimizations, which can save you at least 5% more, and up to 90% in some cases. All of these tools will also blindly strip metadata (but it's not guaranteed!) along with color profiles and Exif Orientation resulting in color shifts and image transformations respectively. Most importantly, none of them are good enough for automatic lossy compression. Guetzli is the closest but it still has some severe issues [3]. I'm also trying to build a real thing, and it is hard. > there’s value in using WebP formats where possible WebP lossless and WebP lossy are quite different formats. WebP lossy being always 4:2:0 is not a good replacement for JPEG [4] especially at higher quality. On the contrary WebP lossless has evolved into a decent alternative for PNG including lossy [5]. Proper responsive images would give you considerably smaller page weight and improve performance on mobile devices. BTW Google treats oversized images as unoptimized [6]. [1] https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/http-status-codes/everything-ok-683.jpg https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/http-status-codes/e... [2] https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/articles/freshman-1600-original.png https://freshman.tech/assets/dist/images/articles/freshman-1... [3] https://github.com/google/guetzli/issues https://github.com/google/guetzli/issues [4] https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07/15/mozilla-advances-jpeg-encoding-with-mozjpeg-2-0/ https://research.mozilla.org/2014/07/15/mozilla-advances-jpe... [5] https://twitter.com/jyzg/status/958629795692150790 https://twitter.com/jyzg/status/958629795692150790 [6] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffreshman.tech&tab=desktop https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

molotovbliss 8y ago

https://github.com/DarthSim/imgproxy/ https://github.com/DarthSim/imgproxy/ imgproxy I've not seen mentioned, it is probably the fastest image processing I've used yet. It uses libvips, https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/wiki/HOWTO----Image-shrinking https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips/wiki/HOWTO----Image-shrin... which not only handles resizing & other basic img needs but optimizes on top of being very light weight on memory & CPU cycles compared to most other implementations.

Bluecobra 8y ago

Coincidentally, when I was a freshman in high school in the late 90's this was a topic our instructor drilled into us. I remember trying to shave off every little kilobyte for .gif and .jpg files and to make my personal website load as quickly as possible with a reasonable amount of quality over a modem. From my perspective, it seems that everything has gotten way more bloated there is an assumption that everyone has unlimited data and bandwidth. I used to have a 1GB data cap on my phone that I would blow out in a couple of weeks from just reading news websites. For example, bloomberg.com shouldn't need to make nearly ~300 requests and download 18mb of data just to load the front page.

MR4D 8y ago
Your comment made me bring out DevTools, because I thought your number of requests you said ("~300") sounded a bit high. Boy was I wrong!!! - 500/565 requests - 7.0 MB transferred - 9.86 second to load Holy crap!!!
- Jach 8y ago
  "Install our app!"
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    Try dailytelegraph.com.au for a good shock! On mobile, but last I checked was around 700 HTTP requests on a desktop without adblock.
    - adventured 8y ago
      Checked it on Pingdom, from Melbourne, it failed after one minute of trying to load, with 585 requests and 3.4mb. I always find it difficult to imagine what kind of process leads to that result. The developers can't be happy about it, surely. It has to be a case where management and everyone else throws things they want into the project, a big concensus party, and you end up with a bloated monster at the end.

partiallypro 8y ago

I use Kraken on every site I do for this reason.

stereo 8y ago

You can save another 7.6% on that png by passing it through advpng+pngout. ImageOptim is fantastic for this: https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac

chrisparton1991 8y ago

For one of my websites (a static page with some pretties), I challenged myself to remove as much cruft as possible without degrading the experience. I used Fontello to strip out unnecessary FontAwesome icons and uncss to remove unused Bootstrap styles, replaced some Bootstrap JS with vanilla JS and made use of SVGs (optimised with SVGOMG) for backgrounds and the logo. The resulting site is a total of 178Kb when viewed in Chrome (down from over 1MB), including bootstrap, analytics, some screenshots, a custom font and animated logo. There's plenty more I could do to trim off size, but I had more important things to do. There are so many ways to make webpages smaller and more efficient, and it can be a really fun learning experience.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

Hate to ask a dumb question but What are the best tools/strategies to optimize images?