Image optimization is an art that not many people master. There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but “under the hood” a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images – without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Smush it comes in different flavours:

• 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

Saving bytes has never been so easy – you point us in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest for you. A ZIP archive with optimized images will be generated for you.

New from the Yahoo Performance team.

Takes your image(s) and makes their file size as small as possible: converts GIF to PNG8, throws out JPG metadata, etc.  Does not make JPGs more lossy; the results look exactly the same.

Install the Firefox plugin and you can hand it a URL — and when it’s done, it’ll give you a ZIP file of all the images from that URL in reduced form.

Our Travel page, for instance:
Smushed 12.97% or 30.14 KB from the size of your image(s).
I’m actually pretty pleased we are “only” 30KB over.  I’d have thought it’d be more.

Our visitor HIW page:
Smushed 30.48% or 51.16 KB from the size of your image(s).