Can anyone recommend a decent tool for optimizing images other than Photoshop

Question

Can anyone recommend a decent tool for optimising images other than adobe photoshop, the gimp etc?

I'm looking to optimise images for the web preferably online and free.

Basically I have a client who can't install additional software on their work PC but needs to optimise photographs and other images for their website and is presently uploading 1 or 2 Mb files.

On a personal level I'm interested to see what other people are using...

Answer 1

Another vote for Irfanview with the Riot plugin which adds a "save for web" feature.

Answer 2

smush.it is available online and also as part of Yahoo's YSlow website speed debugger utility. You can run it directly on a web page, and it'll provide you with a zip file of the optimised images to download.

Answer 3

I am not sure if I understood your question correctly. If you are looking to improve images on the server, you might want to take a look at ImageMagick. It offers a wide variety of image transformations you can control from the command line, so it's easy to use in scripts.

If you want a client-side program but you cannot install software, there is also a portable version of The Gimp.

Answer 4

how about something like Irfanview. You can run it from a USB drive and it works great. All you have to do is download the zipped version and unzip it to a USB stick. It allows you to crop, rotate, resize/resample, adjust colors, brightness, contrast. I use it when I really need to get something done in a hurry and don't want to wait for PS to load.

Answer 5

Not sure exactly what you are asking for, but I use Photofiltre when I need to edit any photos.
It is free, easy to use, and quite powerful. It is specifically designed for image retouching, and you should be able to get up and running very quickly.
Ok, after your edit I see what you were asking for. I recommend using an online photo editor if they cannot install other software. There are a lot of options that are free for your client to choose from.

Answer 6

Definitely PunyPNG (punypng.com). There is a max file size per image (350KB [up from 100KB about a year ago]) but you can batch-upload and then download them all in a single zip file. It also has a public API (in beta).

PunyPNG works on png, jpg, gif, and animated gif. It performs just as well as Google PageSpeed's image compression and Yahoo's Smush.It (the smush.it service sucks since Yahoo! "mainstreamed" the project). View a comparison chart.

PNGOutWin (downloadable, installable, and Photoshop-pluginable; PNG only) works best on PNG's from my experience...I don't know if there is a portable version that can run without install.

Lastly there is PNGQuant which will allow you to take your 32/24 bit PNGs with alpha transparency and quantize and dither them down to 8 bit or less while preserving the alpha channel (as a bonus: IE6 will display the partially transparent pixels with 100% transparency instead of the dreaded grey background)...you will sometimes lose some image quality with this tool, but it can greatly reduce file size.