I’ve noticed a problem in the way I manage my media library – if I don’t go out of my way to compress images to a reasonable quality level for speedy delivery, nothing in the path of execution does it for me and the images download slowly because they’re too big.
I could use photoshop etc. to compress images but I don’t want stuff slowing me down. I’m playing around now with the reSmush.it plugin and this is looking like something good for my purposes.
To start off I bulk-compressed my images using the default 92%-quality setting. This reduced my image sizes by just 6%. It’s nice though that the plugin saves backups of your original images. So you can keep playing with settings without compromising your original images at any time.
I played with the settings and got these results…
- default setting 92% quality gave 6% reduction in file size.
- setting of 50% gave 47% size reduction
- setting of 25% gave 65% size reduction (noticeable degradation)
- setting of 10% gave 82% size reduction (a little crappy but quite legible)
- setting of 3% gave 94% size reduction (a very pixelated image but you can certainly tell what it is)
I tentatively set quality at 50% which seems like crappy images but if so I can’t appreciate it 🙂
Edit: I looked at this on some more images and bumped up the quality to 75%.