Download the Smush it Firefox extension to follow along with my post.
I’m at Ajax Experience this week with my teammate, Stoyan Stefanov. This morning we did a lightning-demo of our new tool SmushIt.com. Smush it allows you to automate image optimization by using the best of open source algorithms to achieve the smallest, high performance images possible.
Smush it comes in different flavors:
- You can upload a bunch of pictures in your browser
- You can provide us with a list of image urls or
- You can get a Firefox Extension to optimize the images found on any web page
Our fundamental principal was that the images we produced needed to be 100% pixel for pixel faithful to the original quality. That means that our techniques are completely lossless. We decided to let designers decide what quality level was necessary, then, given that quality, we use the best open source compression algorithms to make the image as small as possible.
Smush it also generates a zip so that you can easily download and replace all of the images in your page.The tool smushes your images in several ways and outputs the best result, or gives you a bravo if your images are already optimized. Some of the options we test are:
- Crush PNG
- Convert GIF to PNG
- Convert JPG to progressive JPG
- Remove Metadata
- Compress animated GIF
We would love feature requests, bugs, or suggestions so that we can improve the tool. I am nicole at my domain. At Ajax Experience I showed the tool on Korea Yahoo, BBC News, and Barack Obama’s site. Can you guess who had over 300K of useless image bloat?
Modern sites are doing more than they ever have before, this tool will help keep them lean, mean, and (of course) fast.
Christian Heilmann recorded a video of our demo for YDN. The audio is a bit wonky, I’ll link to the official AE recordings as they become available.