Comments on: Smushit.com makes image optimizing a breeze

By: Remedies

Remedies — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:08:05 +0000

Thats very useful
thanks

By: stoyan

stoyan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:01:19 +0000

@NICCAI = we have a command-line version and intend to open-source the tool, so you can run it locally and go like:

$smu /path/to/my/s**t ;)

Just need some time to catch our breath, after the ajax experience sprint ;)

@tlrobinson – yes, pngcrush for PNGs, jpegtran to jpegs, image magick to figure out which file is which and also to convert gifs to png8

@dtetto – that’s what the Firefox extension, companion to the tool, does. You visit any page, click the extension icon, and you’re given the results, also an option to download a zip. And yes, the idea is that once you have smush.it installed locally, you can make it part of the build process, together with the minification.

@ck2 – pngcrush seemed like an easy choice, it’s a command-line tool and can be automated. The idea was to have something complete working, then we want to further play with the other optimizers, like optipng, pngrewrite and any others, so we can squeeze the max possible. JPEG is lossy, true, but jpegtran is he tool we use that allows for lossless operations such as stripping EXIF data.

By: ck2

ck2 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:54:58 +0000

PngOptimizer is better than PngCrush and PngOut (and comes with source) http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php

jpeg is a whole other problem with it being lossy – however there are now more and more tools to do lossless cropping which is nice.

By: jonhartmann

jonhartmann — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:54:06 +0000

@dtetto
I’m not really worried about image piracy, and like you said, the tools already exist, I’m just pointing out that this tool might have other uses then just optimizing images for the web. Is the loss of that metadata worth the bandwidth savings? As a developer, I’d say it is, but a graphics artist might not appreciate it.

By: dtetto

dtetto — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:05:00 +0000

Here's what I think the killer feature would be: let us put webpage URLs (not images); so I'd enter a given page and the script would find all the images (image tags and CSS URLs) and then process them and zip 'em up for me. That way I could quickly go through my live sites (and any new sites, post-deployment) and shrink the size of the whole page. Heck, combine in the minify project for minifying JS, CSS, and HTML and you've got a real site optimizer on your hands!

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:58:07 +0000

I haven’t used smu but pngcrush can definitely reduce png file sizes significantly from Photoshop’s “save for web” output. In my experience, usually somewhere between 15-35%.

By: waynep

waynep — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:59:41 +0000

I smushed this post and:

Smushed 14.12% or 13.84 KB from the size of your image(s). How did we do it? See the table below for more details.

Neat.

By: Jordan1

Jordan1 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:25:19 +0000

@jeromew
wikipedia says:
smu = small microscopic undigested

By: schammy

schammy — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:56:01 +0000

Image editors do leave a crapton of extra meta data in images, but Photoshop’s “save for web” works really well to strip out all of this data and just save the raw image. I don’t think this service would do a better job than Photoshop, except that Photoshop is like a million dollars, so i guess it has an advantage in that department!

By: tlrobinson

tlrobinson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:39:20 +0000

pngcrush is the open source command line utility I suspect they’re using on the backend to compress pngs. Not sure about other formats.

By: NICCAI

NICCAI — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:35:58 +0000

Am I the only one that would like this locally? Any chance of that? That said, very nice. Thanks for your efforts.

By: mattcurrie

mattcurrie — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:58:20 +0000

A great tool. The multiple upload function is cool, but would be nice if it was also possible to upload a ZIP archive containing multiple images.

By: dtetto

dtetto — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:53:02 +0000

jonhartmann, don’t be silly. You’re worrying about the small slice of users who are web savvy, then the smaller subset of those users who know about an use smush.it, and then the still smaller slice of those users who also pirate images, and then the infinitesimally small slicer of those users who also visit websites made by smush.it users? Even assuming smush.it gets massive market penetration, what’s to prevent would-be pirates from using one of the legions of desktop tools to edit your metadata or even just take a plain-old screenshot of your content and re-save it?

On topic: Does this strip out much more than Photoshop’s “Save for Web”? I love seeing tools like this online for sure, but I’m only seeing 1 or 2% reductions on all my web photos.

By: jonhartmann

jonhartmann — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:50:45 +0000

@Stubbornella:
Although I like the idea, I’m not sure that it would change much… if I choose to leave the information in my optimized images, someone else could point smush.it at my image and strip them out… you’d have to do something like add a bit of data to the file that says it has been smushed and then have smush.it not to smush it again.

By: sjivan

sjivan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:07:25 +0000

This is really cool. I was able to see gains of over 40% in some tests I ran.

Last year at the TAE YUI performance session, the audience was asked for suggestions and I suggested incorporating such functionality into YSlow. Would be great it this is integrated into YSlow numbers, but the current interface is really nice too.

By: ThomasHansen

ThomasHansen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:03:21 +0000

Nice :)

By: Stubbornella

Stubbornella — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:41:54 +0000

@jeromew lol

@jonharmann Yes, Smush it does strip metadata that can contain copyright information.

Stoyan and I have talked about offering an option to keep certain bits of metadata, like copyright. For instance, getty requires some JPG to be served with a thumbnail inside the original image.

Is this a feature you would find useful?

By: jonhartmann

jonhartmann — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:18:06 +0000

lol… on a more serious note, would this also be stripping out the digit info that help to identify an image in the case of image theft?

By: jeromew

jeromew — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:06:40 +0000

What is a Smu?