As a web designer or web developer, image optimization is very important for loading website faster and also reduces the bandwidth consumption benefit your hosting bill. You should perform both basic and advanced optimization for all images without changing their look or visual quality. Basic optimization includes cropping unnecessary space, reducing color dept, removing image comments, and saving the image to an appropriate format. Advanced optimization involves further compression of JPEG and PNG files. Here is a roundup for all the excellent web-based image optimization editing tools that you can use without a dime on the web.

Web-based Image Optimization Tools

1. Smush.it

http://smush.it/

Smush.it is a free service that optimizes images for publishing on the web. It compresses and converts images automatically and works with most types of image formats such as JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and animated GIF files. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download. You can choose to upload your images directly to the service, provide Smush.it with a url, use a Firefox plugin that analyzes a whole page at once, or the Sumsh.it bookmarklet.

2. Web Resizer

http://www.webresizer.com/

This free online image resizing tool Web Resizer helps you optimize and editing photos for web or email on the fly. It provides all basic image resizing and optimization features you need to make your pictures smaller, including crop, resize, sharpen, rotate images, adjust contrast, brightness and color saturation levels and add border etc. This web based application is very easy to use and no registration required. It supports maximum image size uploaded up to 5MB.

3. iResize

http://www.iresize.com/

iResize is a fast and free, simple to use online image resizing tool that allows you to easily reduce the size of your photo by pixels and bytes. It completely works in all of your favorite modern web browsers and operating systems.

4. Pic Resize

http://www.picresize.com/

Pic Resize offers an alternative to the usual image editor. Just upload the image you want to resize or edit and then get to work. There are default options for resizing: 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. You can also customize any size as you want. There are some special effects that you can select before final download the optimization image, like equalize, grayscale, sharpen, spread, gaussian blur, oil paint, rotate, polaroid, crop, brightness, contrast, or raised Frame. PicResize supports JPEG, GIF, and PNG image format.

5. Shrink Pictures

http://www.shrinkpictures.com/

Shrink Pictures provides us a simple online image resizing service as simple as 1, 2, 3. Browse and select your image to resize, choose the new size for your picture, select output image quality (good, better or best), click “Resize” button and wait for the processed images to be displayed, that’s it. Uploaded images can be up to 6Meg in size and all resized images are automatically converted to JPG format. If you need to “shrink” a picture to avatar size then do it with the Shrink Avatars tool.

6. DynamicDrive Image Optimizer

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/

DynamicDrive Image Optimizer lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site. Furthermore, you can easily convert from one image type to another image format. Upload Size limit up to 300 kB. Enter the url of image or directly upload from your computer, and then click “optimize”, it would show up the several optimization image level from low to higher.

7. Resize Image

http://resizeimage.org/

You choose a picture, you upload it, and then you alter its size. You can have your pick from three main options, “Small”, “Medium” and “Large”. An advanced editor is provided in case you wish to handle the task at hand as minutely as possible. The current file size is also highlighted on the left. All images uploaded are hosted on the resizeimage.org server for one week.

8. Easy Cropper

http://www.easycropper.com/

Easy Cropper is a easy and simple way for you to crop any image for use on the web. Once you have selected your photo from your computer library, all you have to do is select the desired height and width in pixels, and click “Continue”. You are then presented with a preview of your new photo which you may either confirm or edit further, and then you’re done.

9. ImageOptimizer.net

http://www.imageoptimizer.net/

Using this free online optimized images service, you can resize, compress and optimize your image files that are more suitable for web pages or email attachments.

10. Resizr

http://www.resizr.com/

This tool lets you resize, crop, lighten, darken, convert image, post to social media site like MySpace, and send images via email or SMS.

Recommendations

Serve images size appropriately, do not serve images that are larger than the dimensions used in the pages. Choose an appropriate image file format, for example use JPG for all photographic-style images. Last, there is load of free convenient tools available for you optimize images. Give it a try for your daily usage or next web project.