Useful online graphics optimizers

It's a good advice as graphic images can be of help to create a nice looking website, but also cause some troubles when used too liberally.

Compared to textual informations images require more disk space and consequently utilize more bandwith when the web page is loaded from the server.

For this reason a page with many images will always load slower than one containing only text.

Graphics optimizers are useful tools that can alleviate these problems by reducing the size of the images commonly utilized on web pages.

Any graphics manipulation software includes image optimization functions.

However online graphics optimizers have the advantage that you can do all the work online without downloading and installing anything on your computer.

All the following sites offer image optimization tools. I've personally tested all of them and they work just fine.

SiteReportCard

An useful site that offers several free website maintenance tools. Their online graphics optimizer is really simple to use and supports the most common web graphic formats (GIF, JPEG, PNG).

If the image you want to compress is already on your website you can simply enter its url (http://yoursite.com/yourimage.gif).

Otherwise you can browse your hard disk content and specify the file path.

Once pressed the button Optimize Your Image you will see several images at different levels of optimization and image quality (greater the reduction in size, lower the image quality).

You need only to choose the image you prefer, click it with the right mouse button, select Save Image as and download it to your computer.

GifWorks

With this free online GIF editor you can create special effects, resize and optimize your GIF images.

Used like graphics optimizer it creates multiple images with different levels of optimization from any GIF file fetched by your local hard drive or directly retrived from your website.

Then you can select the image with the better compression / quality ratio and save it to your computer or to a remote FTP server.

A great tool. Its only drawback is that it only supports the GIF format.

MyImager

Another online tool that allows you to resize, rotate and optimize both GIF and JPEG images loaded from your local computer or from the web.

You can also apply several graphic effects to the images.

This tool can be used for free, but if you sign up for a paid membership you will be able to manage bigger files (up to 2 megabytes / 1000 pixels) and work without the annoyance of pop-up advertisements and banners.

These are in my opinion the best online graphics optimizers. I hope you will find them useful to create faster and more efficient websites.