A great addition to my toolbox: ImageOptim

Recently, I happened upon ImageOptim, a lightweight and incredibly effective image optimizer for PNG, JPEG, and GIF images (runs on Mac OS X only — sorry, Windows friends). It provides a ridiculously simple frontend to several commandline optimization tools. I often find myself dropping image sizes on an average of 20% per file — pretty impressive for already small .pngs that I work with. If you’re a Web designer and have Mac OS X, I consider this tool a must-have for squishing down your images to the last byte.

  • http://www.michaelcritz.com Michael Critz

    Based on your recommendation, I downloaded ImageOptim. I was seeing better results than Photoshop’s Save for Web command. Great recommendation!

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jared-Smith/21300249 Jared Smith

      Glad you like it, Michael — as it turns out, Photoshop Save for Web is actually a pretty weak feature. Some folks I’ve talked to swear by Fireworks as being a vast improvement over Photoshop, but even then I’m still able to squeeze out some additional optimizations of Fireworks-exported files with these tools.

  • http://www.michaelcritz.com Michael Critz

    Based on your recommendation, I downloaded ImageOptim. I was seeing better results than Photoshop’s Save for Web command. Great recommendation!

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jared-Smith/21300249 Jared Smith

      Glad you like it, Michael — as it turns out, Photoshop Save for Web is actually a pretty weak feature. Some folks I’ve talked to swear by Fireworks as being a vast improvement over Photoshop, but even then I’m still able to squeeze out some additional optimizations of Fireworks-exported files with these tools.