There’s a Tool for That - TinyPNG.org

Performance is critical to the success of any web site. At Squirro we use css spriting, domain sharding, javascript minification, http compression and many other rather complex methods to ensure that our service is as fast as possible.

But one thing is as easy as pie: keep your images file sizes small. 

Enter TinyPNG.org. A service that trims a lot of fat from your PNG images without a noticeable difference in quality.

Let’s see an example:

The Squirro logo, as saved by Photoshop CS6, 20.6 kilobytes

Now the same image, optimised with TinyPNG.org, 9.7 kilobytes

Thats a 53% reduction, and I can’t see a difference. Can you?

There are other tools out there. OptiPNG and pngcrush both reduce the above Photoshop image by about 13%. While these clearly can’t keep up with size reduction, both are open-source and command line tools. You can easily include them in scripts and applications. For example you can automatically optimise all of the png files that your users upload. With TinyPNG this is not feasible, as you have to go to their site and optimise them manually.

Its also important to understand that TinyPNG reduces the numbers of colours in your image. So there may be cases where an optimised image looks worse. But I yet have to see such an example.

So, go ahead and speed up your site. Run all of your sites PNG’s through TinyPNG.org. It’s easy & free, but don’t forget to donate and keep panda George happy.

What tools are you using to reduce your file sizes? Do you know of a tool that can beat TinyPNG?