Resizing a photo or reducing the weight in a professional way, in order to upload it as optimized as possible on the web, is an indispensable job. Any administrator of an online project, be it an eCommerce, a blog, or a service sales page, should be able to do this job of resizing photos correctly.
But that’s not all, but the fact of being able to lose weight without losing quality will allow you to improve the loading speed of all those URLs where these elements and digital illustrations are present, with the large number of advantages that this has for SEO. and web usability.
And it is that, as you will surely guess, if the images included in a website design are not optimized properly, they will consume a large amount of resources from your hosting service and make it much slower.
How to shrink a photo or reduce photo size on a website or blog? What free tools can we use to compress or reduce photo size without losing the image quality to use?
How to resize a photo, all methods
So, if we take into account that photographs, banners, and infographics are the most seductive contents on the Internet and that we will surely want to use them on our website or blog, knowing which are the main tools to reduce photos without losing quality is a fundamental need.
Taking this into account, I would like to make you an important clarification, when we talk about photo compression we refer to the following 2 actions which should always be closely linked to each other:
- First, let’s resize the image to the minimum number of pixels needed.
- Secondly, we reduce its weight (Mb or Kb) without losing its visual quality.
All of this will allow us to decrease photo size (or the weight of an image) without having to sacrifice their visual quality in the process I just explained. Therefore, let’s see how to resize images online and on our website via plugins.
1) TinyPNG – (best option to resize photos online)
This is the free page to compress photos or to reduce photo weight that I use the most in my day. With it, I optimize the weight of almost all the JPG and PNG files that I will upload to my blog.
TinyPNG supports uploading 20 files at a time up to 5MB each. Despite the name of this tool, it is capable of reducing the weight of a jpg or png file.
After automatically reducing the size of the photos, TinyPNG allows us to download them one by one or in batches, either in a compressed folder called “tinified” or to host them in our Dropbox account.
It makes it easy to compress or resize an image for free and with minimal quality loss. That is, by selectively reducing the number of superfluous colors, they will also reduce their size in bytes.
TinyPNG is one of the most powerful photo compression services on the market. It reduces a large percentage of the weight of an image (sometimes dramatically) just by improving the number of colors, without being able to quality anything.
TinyPNG also offers a free and paid WordPress plugin for Photoshop, compatible with Windows and Mac.
2) Squoosh.app – (Best program to resize photos online)
Last year Google introduced us to SQUOOSH.APP, originally presented as an application or tool for developers, but today it can be used by any type of user.
It is completely free and works 100% online, i.e. from any web browser. Thanks to this, it does not consume resources from your computer or mobile device and allows us to compress images reducing their weight and change the file format.
The application allows us to change photo format in 6 different- PNG, JPG, OptiPNG, MozJPG, WebP, Browser, or WebP. With Squoosh coming into play, Google wanted to offer a converter that helps us prioritize the loading speed of our websites.
3) PhotoShop
This popular photo editing and retouching program has a free feature called “Save Image for Web“. From it, and once you have made all the relevant changes, you can save your image with “minimum workable” features, so that it has as little weight as possible. All this, of course, without compromising on quality.
And this option is super useful since we sometimes find that no matter how much we pass a photo through the online tools, it still weighs slightly more than recommended.
Obviously, the format in which the file will be saved will be JPG, which you must take into account if this is not the desired format to treat the photo later.
Even so, I recommend that you use this PhotoShop feature to get out of a hurry regarding weight reduction of the photos you want to upload to your website.
4) Compression and optimization of smush images (Smush It!)
Smush is a free online application and plugin for WordPress for compressing photos on the Internet (owned by Yahoo!).
With the plugin formerly known as Smush.it, we can reduce the size of a photo without changing its appearance, reducing the quality of the image, or losing part of its dimensions (height and width).
Smush Image Compression and Optimization makes it easy to process a wide range of formats and file types (such as- JPG, GIF, and PNG). Furthermore, it is one of the best known and most used WordPress plugins on the market.
Although in the past this plugin was one of the main options in image compression services, today there are many others that have been put on the same level or that offer much higher performance than it.
5) Kraken.io
Surely, even if you don’t know Kraken yet, it will surprise you once you try it, as it is a small “over-optimized” tool, so it goes very fast.
Furthermore, you have the possibility to upload your photos in “Drag & Drop” mode, that is, simply by dragging your photos, you can have them on the platform, so that in a few seconds, you can reduce photo size.
It has 3 compression modes, each of which adds a greater or lesser percentage of final weight.
6) JPEGmini
With JPEGmini, which is a useful tool for reducing JPG sizes (greatly reduces their weight, up to almost 80%), you can preserve the high resolution and quality of your content.
JPEGmini has a free online version that allows us to upload up to 20 photos per day and, as in other websites, also offers several options or Premium (or Pro) versions without restrictions.
7) Optimizilla
With Optimizilla you can compress the weight of up to 20 images at a time. However, its biggest difference from other tools I’ve mentioned in this post is that while each file is queued, you can adjust the compression level using a slider. Also, you can compare the result with the original file.
Therefore, it is a very useful tool to have more control over the compression level of our images, being able to view the results before downloading them. The formats supported by Optimizilla are PNG and JPEG.
8) Compress JPEG
Compress Jpeg is a free online application that allows you to compress multiple photos at the same time. Support formats- JPG, PNG, and SVG. Furthermore, Compress Jpeg, which supports compression of up to 20 photos at a time, makes it easy to download by creating a zip file with all the content.
9) How to resize a photo with Image Optimizer
Image Optimizer is a free tool available online or in desktop application format, to download and install on your computer. With ImageOptimizer.net you can compress photos or change their quality, you can also change the size of your image files by indicating their width and height, with just a few clicks.
10) Optimizer.io
It is a plugin for WordPress launched by Webempresa hosting, open to be used by any user, client, or not. It is a plugin responsible for optimizing and reducing the weight of images once uploaded to our server.
Optimizador.io promises weight reduction between 20% and 70% without any appreciable loss of quality. The plugin is very easy to use, just install, activate, and automatically optimize our images. It also identifies the new content that we upload and once optimized it will show us the percentage of weight reduction achieved in them.
Also, another feature that makes this plugin interesting is that the photos are taken from our server and optimized on Webempresa. And then it replaces them again with the ones already optimized, thus saving our work on the server.
11) Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a very easy to use tool that provides a powerful reduction in the size of a photo or compresses images super optimally.
It allows you to drastically reduce the size of photos while maintaining a very high visual quality of the same, with almost no discrepancy in the compression before or after that image. Compressor.io accepts files up to 10MB in weight, which you can compress to almost 90% of their original weight.
Another advantage it has is that it supports up to four different formats:
- Jpeg
- PNG
- GIF
- Svg
After processing, Compressor.io allows you to download the file to your computer or save it to Dropbox and Google Drive.
12) CompressNow
This is a free online service, that is, with CompressNow you can compress free photos as it supports files in gif, jpeg, and png format. Compressnow allows us to upload a wide variety of files (up to 9MB) and choose different levels of image weight reduction while preserving the width and height of the original photograph.
13) ImageOptim (for Mac)
As you could read in the title of this tool, Apple users have great help optimizing images here. And is that ImageOptin is a downloadable program with which you will eliminate a little the weight of the photos that you have to upload to your website or that you have available for your personal or client projects. Without a doubt, I highly recommend it.
14) Short Pixel
This is one of the WordPress plugins that web designers recommend the most to optimize your images, without compromising their quality. Short Pixel promises its users to reduce around 70-80% of the weight of each of them and in just a few seconds, which doesn’t waste too much time.
15) How to reduce photo size and weight with Web Resizer
Web Photo Resizer offers an image optimization service for our website. With this tool, we will be able to carry out some of those previous activities I mentioned at the beginning to adapt to the optimal size. Some of those activities we can perform with WebResizer.com are:
- Cut
- Resize (width, height)
- Rotate
- Automatically enhance general settings (contrast, brightness, saturation) with just one click of a few buttons
- Convert to black and white
- Reduce the weight of each image
How to resize a photo, conclusion
When it comes to improving our internet presence, one differentiator is having a visually appealing and pleasing design on our website.
Using any of the good tools recommended in this post will allow us to optimize and compress our images without losing that quality. But beyond that, that design needs to be properly optimized in terms of SEO as well.
And a key aspect to take into consideration here is to reduce the size and weight of the photos we use on our site so as not to impact loading times.
In short, it is an optimization factor that we must carry out from the beginning (and at all times) with each new file that we upload to our hosting.
