How to reduce Web image file size

Preamble

This part of my Website is, unfortunately, a fossil: it's now over 2 years old, but I've left it online as it still provides a guide to shareware programs available for graphics compression, even if it isn't complete or up to date. In the meantime, I've changed career (bureaucrat to web designer!) and I've settled on graphics programs that I know and use.

What are they? Well, for compressing GIFs and animated GIFs, you can't do better than Ignite. For Web graphics work, Photoshop 6 now incorporates ImageReady - though it is very capable it is mighty expensive. It's still a bit print-oriented, which is not surprising, given Photoshop's origins.

Macromedia Fireworks version 4, released late 2000, has become my graphics software of choice for generating and compressing images for the Web. It's not as cheap as the shareware programs but it's a lot less expensive than Photoshop, too. Several months ago, a friend of mine, Linda Rathgeber, invited me to join her in writing a book about creating web graphics using Fireworks 4. The result is "Playing with Fire", to be published on July 1st 2001.

If you're interested in preparing graphics for the Web, I'd recommend Fireworks 4, and (of course) Playing with Fire as a guide to the sort of things you can do with Fireworks.

The book isn't a 'how to operate the machinery' type of book, it's a guide to the creative things you can do with Fireworks. It even includes a tutorial on how I built the stomping foot graphic above. Take a look at it on the Amazon site.

If you'd like to see the old graphics compression pages, they still contain plenty of useful information and they're available here.

This page last updated 19 May 2001