Free Image Tool For Bloggers And Other Webby Folk

This posting is inspired by a comment from reader Sophia on my posting "Cloudy Autumn Day" below. One of the banes of a webmaster's existence is images. Yes they're wonderful, I well remember the early "text only" web, in fact I remember when the web consisted of DARPANET and JANET (yes I'm that old). But a lot of images slow a page down dramatically. What to do? Well there's lots you can do. But the first thing to do is to reduce the amount of data in the image. Most bloggers don't realise, because they haven't been told, that they can greatly reduce the amount of time an image takes to download without ruining the quality. Dynamic Drive have a free, on-line, and excellent service that does this for you. It works like this: You go to the page. You upload your image. You pick the image that in your opinion gives the best trade-off between quality and file-size. You save that image to your computer. You post that image to your blog. You can see a screen-shot that shows a typical saving in filesize and therefore the speed at which an image will load: here Link to Dynamic Drive's free service: Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer- GIF, JPG, and PNG markfromireland