If you plan to include a number of images in the template slideshow which will be displayed on the home page or other pages at your site we recommend you optimize / compress the images first to make the images smaller.
Reducing the size of the JPEG images will make your website load faster and give your visitors a better user experience.
Free Image Optimization Sites & Software
The following websites are great for compressing JPEG files and can reduce the size of the image by up to 30% without loosing any image quality.
We recommend visiting all the sites noted below and experimenting with each one to see which one gives you the best result.
The JPEG Mini is a free and easy to use site. All you need to do is upload the JPEG image via the website and it will automatically compress the image which you can then download to your computer.
The great thing about JPEG Mini is that you don’t loose the image quality after the image is compressed.
The image optimizer tool at Yahoo is free and easy to use and produces some good results.
Again all you have to do is select the up loader tab and choose the JPEG image you want to compress.
Once the image is compressed then you can download it to your PC.
Another very useful feature included in Smush It is that you can enter your website address and the tool will scan all the images included in your site and give you the option to compress them.
One piece of free software we would recommend you download is called RIOT which stands for Radical Image Optimization Tool. RIOT is free and very easy to use and produces some great results.
From the tests we have competed we have compressed JPEG images by up to 30% without loosing any image quality.
RIOT is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7
