Q: How can I optimize website graphics to be smaller without sacrificing quality?

A: Two free web services let you upload images to them, and they optimize the image, reducing its size without affecting the quality of the image in any way. The reduced size saves bandwidth and makes your website load faster. The two web services are as follows:

Although you can manually upload images if you use Visual Studio, a plug-in for Visual Studio called Image Optimizer  uses both PunyPNG and Smushit to optimize images to Visual Studio (see screen shot below).
optimizegraphicvsadd-Copy

When you run the it, the progress of the optimization and the web engine used is shown (see below). You can also see how much each image is optimized. Remember that the actual image looks exactly the same, because it doesn’t reduce the quality of the image.

Progress output from using smushit on JPG images:

 d:tempwww.savilltech.comWebApplication1imagesvideossccm2012osd1.jpg - using http://smushit.com
Before: 6468 bytes
After: 5971 bytes
Savings: 7.68%

d:tempwww.savilltech.comWebApplication1imagesvideosvdi1.jpg - using http://smushit.com
Before: 13318 bytes
After: 12017 bytes
Savings: 9.77%

d:tempwww.savilltech.comWebApplication1imageswinfilm.jpg - using http://smushit.com
Before: 39882 bytes
After: 34430 bytes
Savings: 13.67%

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