Yahoo’s “Smush It” Image Size Reduction Service

A couple of days ago I came across various news items regarding the launch of Yahoo’s “Smush It” service. Point their web app towards any image online (or just upload one) and it will try its best to decrease the file size with no visible degradation of image quality.

I just browsed through some of the images hosted on wooliet to try it out. Guess what? It works!

It’s incredibly easy to use. The URL entry method allows you to paste in multiple image paths at once. After you click “Smush”, you are (quickly) presented with a table linking to each of the new images along with some stats regarding the amount of reduction. Also very cool is that all of the processed images can be downloaded as a single, automatically generated zip file.

What’s more is that the total savings and zip file stay updated even during multiple “smushes”. Even when the images are added via different methods. For instance, I did a single URL first. Then I removed that URL from the entry area and did a bunch at once. At some point I also just uploaded a single file. After all that, the stats updated to reflect the total reductions and the zip file link contained all the new images.

Obvious Usage Tip ™

I’ve been using FireFTP for awhile now. It’s a great FTP client that plugs directly into Firefox. When viewing files on your server, you can select one and hit <CTRL>+U to copy the URL (as opposed to the server’s file path). To be able to do this though, you first have to edit that connection’s “Advanced” settings so that FireFTP will know how to construct the url.

For example, here’s my settings:

And for bonus points, you can select multiple files, hit <CTRL>+U and it will paste all the URL’s as a list. So if you’ve got a single directory with a bunch of image files in it, just <Ctrl>+A select them all, copy the URL’s and then with one quick paste into SmushIt’s URL loader, it’s all done. You’ve got a zip you can download and use to overwrite all the old, fat images with their new, slimmed versions.