Posts Tagged ‘RIOT’

If you’re working on the web, you know that you need to conserve bandwidth and make your site as lightweight as possible so it will pop up fast. One of the best things you can do is to optimize your images, which, in most cases, will not degrade their quality noticeably, but will halve the size.

A great freeware tool I found which will help you optimize your images is RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool). It shows the original and the optimized image side-by-side, so you can decide when your image is starting to degrade, and when it still looks good, allowing you to upload the smallest possible image to your site.

You can choose different formats and change settings for a lot of values, like color reduction, which will help you reduce size without affecting quality. The only problem I see with RIOT is that it doesn’t allow for batch optimization. As a blogger it is a good tool for me since I write posts one at a time and search for images when I’m done. However, as a web developer it is easier to build a site and optimize at the end, which might mean a lot of images.