OneTipADay - What Will You Learn Today?

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:32 AM PDT

Posted on One Tip A Day - What Will You Learn Today?

Ensuring that your webpages load as quickly as possible is not only important for your site visitors, but how fast webpages load is now part of Google’s search engine ranking mechanism. There are many tools out there to help you reduce the size of their images, but RIOT is probably the best free tool available.

Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT) maximises the compression of your images to make them as small as possible, whilst maintaining as much quality as possible. RIOT shows both the original image and the optimised image side by side so you can adjust how much to quality you want to maintain. 75-80% seems to be an optimum setting for RIOT; check out the image below for example:

A massive reduction of 90% has been achieved, reducing a 572KB image to a 46KB image, and as you can see the image quality has been maintained. I’m in the process of running all the images used on this site through RIOT, and I’m achieving an average file reduction size of around 70% with my custom settings.

Main features:

open many image types including rare/scientific types
save and optimize JPEG, GIF and PNG with a simple, clean user interface
works in dual view: (original – optimized image) or single view (optimized image).
Automatic preview of resulting image
in-place compare function (alternativelly display the original image over the optimized image to notice small pixel changes)
compress files to desired filesize threshold
fast processing (all is done in memory);
see instant results including resulting filesize
batch support (process multiple files at once)
transparency handling options
decide if you want to keep metadata (comments, IPTC, Adobe XMP, EXIF profiles, ICC profiles).
Unsupported metadata is removed
transfer metadata between image formats (destination format must support them)
common tools: pan and zoom, rotate, flip
basic image adjustments: brightness, contrast, gamma, invert
visually reduce number of unique colors for PNG and GIF images in order to reduce filesize
(two quantization methods are available: Xiaolin Wu and NeuQuant neural net)
resize image by using well known resample filters (ex: Lanczos3, Catmull Rom, Bicubic, and others)
out-of-the-box support for external PNG optimizers (optipng, pngout, etc)
the compression and the results are comparable to those of commercial products, even higher.
Adaptive logarithmic tone mapping algorithm (Drago) used for HDR images