Overall Rating

No Ratings

Those family reunion pictures on your website may look great, but if they aren't compressed (compression basically means making the data smaller), they probably are slowing down the load time of your Web page. As a general rule, you want to keep your Web pages less than 100 KB. How do you compress images? Get an image-compression utility, of course. Here are a few of our favorites:

• If you aren't sure just how graphics intensive your website is, you will want to use the free GIF

Wizard SiteScan Survey, which will tell you how efficiently your site uses graphics and HTML. If your site is less than 90 percent efficient, you may want to sign up for the GIF Wizard service, which is a Web-based GIF and JPEG image-compression service that doesn't need to be downloaded to your hard drive. The service, which costs about $19 per month, probably is best used by someone who continuously needs to compress images.

Ulead's SmartSaver Pro is an image-compression utility that you download to compress GIFs, JPEGs, and PNG files. The utility costs $39.95, but you can try it out for free for 15 days. If you would like to learn more about SmartSaver before you download the trial version, use the SmartSaver tutorial, which will lead you through the product's features.

If you are an avid Adobe Photoshop user, you may want to download Adobe ImageReady, which is meant to work in conjunction with the popular program. ImageReady not only offers image-compression features for all of the most popular image types, but it has sophisticated image-editing tools as well. ImageReady costs about $179 or can be downloaded for a 30-day trial period.

Two free image compression utilities are WebGraphics Optimizer, which enables you to compress JPEG, GIF and PNG files, and A Smaller GIF, which is only available for Mac users.

Obviously not all image-compression utilities are created equal. And it's important to find the one that meets your needs, lest you get poorly compressed images (which can be truly ugly).