Top 10 Must-Have Image Optimization Tools for Designers

Optimizing your images is one of the key important factors in allowing your site to run smoothly. When your images aren’t optimized they tend to take up chunks of bandwidth and slow the rate your images and pages load on your site. This is usually a number one reason for traffic being driven away. We’ve scaled the web to find 10 Must-Have Image Optimization Tools for Designers that are sure to be a breeze to use.

Riot

Riot lets you save and optimize various common file formats with the use of a simple and clean graphical user interface. Save for web, print, or email at the highest possible quality, and you’ll also be able to preview images and their projected (advised) size.

PNGGauntlet

PNGGauntlet is a .NET app that uses the PNGOUT command (Windows DOS) to optimize PNG files. Based purely on the optimization of PNG files, it is also able to convert JPG, GIF, TGA, PCX and BMP formats into PNG files.

JPG & PNG Stripper

This application does exactly as it says, it works to strip, remove, and clean-up any unnecessary metadata that may be “impairing” your image files. Formats supported include JPG, JFIF and PNG file formats.

SuperGIF

SuperGIF, a desktop app for Mac and Windows users effortlessly makes all your GIF images and animations smaller. SuperGIF pumps out images over 50% smaller, and it does an even better job with GIF animations that usually get you anywhere to 80% or so smaller.

PNGCrushrrr

PNGCrushrrr is a Mac OS X application that allows you to optimize any of your PNG images, and then ready’s them for sending or uploading to the web. This Mac app works best on 24-bit PNGs and with images saved from Apple’s Preview. It comes with the support of multiple files that can be easily dropped to compress.

iResize

iResize is a fast and effecient online tool used for resizing images for free. It allows you to reduce the size of your images by bytes and pixels, without any issues. It’s pretty much a straight-forward application with ease-of-use.

WebGraphics Optimizer

This tool is great for optimizing and compressing images strictly for web use. The images can be reduced in size to increase the speed of your website. It also recognizes transparency while loading an image and also the last directory used for opening or saving image files. And it supports 38 graphic formats including EMF, CLP,DXF, XPM, IFF,PBM, CUT, XWD, PLT, DGN, XBM, ITG and more!

JPEG Cleaner

And last, but never least, is JPG Cleaner, a simple yet powerful utility for cleaning and freeing JPG files from anything that isn’t picture data related. Common and popular programs such as Illustrator or Gimp usually write additional information into your JPG files that simply aren’t needed. Remove the image waste with JPEG Cleaner!

Super PNG

Super PNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for compressing PNG (”ping”) files without having to open up your browser or any additonal applications on your desktop. It supports all the PNG format and includes some advanced options such as 16-bit color support, variable compression, gamma correction and meta data saving, and since a large portion of designers already use PhotoShop, this is a natural choice.

Web Resizer

Web Resizer helps you optimize pictures, images for websites and email campaigns. It lets you crop, resize, add a border and sharpen your images with the click of a few buttons. You can also take advantage of useful features such as image rotation, resampling filters, color conversion (sepia or black and white) and built-in zip compression to create a zip folder containing all of your processed images.