![]() ![]() These big files completely negate the performance gains you’d expect to get from responsive images and, in fact, can make things worse for your users than if you’d simply loaded the huge unshrunk assets.īelow, I’ll describe why this problem exists and show you how to change ImageMagick’s default settings to solve this problem and get small, great-looking images. Unfortunately, with the default settings, the resized files it outputs are often really big - sometimes bigger than the inputted image, even though the output has fewer pixels. ImageMagick provides a fast, simple way to automate image resizing. Otherwise, look for it in your favorite package manager, or download it directly from the ImageMagick website. If you use Homebrew on a Mac, you can install it like this: brew install imagemagick It’s also available on desktop systems (Mac, Windows and Linux). It is widely supported by content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal, integrated with task runners such as Grunt, and used on its own to automate image editing - including resizing. ImageMagick has been around for almost 25 years and is a full-fledged command-line image editor. A bunch of tools out there do this, including GD and GraphicsMagick, but ImageMagick strikes a good balance between power and availability in hosting environments. ![]() This is where automated image resizing comes in handy. But what about a large website with a lot of images? An online store, for example, might have hundreds or thousands of image assets, and having to create different sizes of each of these is an enormous task. Responsive images to the rescue! Right? Well, yes, but first we have to generate our responsive image assets, and we have to make sure those assets look good and have a small enough footprint to improve the website’s performance.įor a very small website, saving a few different sizes of each image directly in our image editor is trivial - Photoshop even provides a handy “Save for Web” option that keeps file sizes low. (Image: HTTP Archive) ( View large version) The average web page is 2,099 KB, 1,310 KB of which comes from images. Improving web performance and giving a better experience to our users is our job as developers and designers. Even on a fast connection, a 2 MB website can wreak havoc on your users’ data plans and cost them real money. At the same time, millions of people are accessing the Internet on 3G-or-worse connections that make a 2 MB website a horror show to use. The average web page is about 2 MB in size, and about two thirds of that weight is from images. In this article, we’ll see how we can use ImageMagick - an open-source command-line graphics editor - to quickly resize your images, while maintaining great visual quality and really tiny file sizes. Many tools out there automate image resizing, but too often they create large files that cancel out the performance benefits that responsive images are supposed to deliver. It’s fantastic for web performance, but we have to face the grim reality that serving different sizes of images to different users means that we first need to create all of those different files, and that can be a huge pain. The way responsive images work is that an appropriately sized image is sent to each user - small versions for users on small screens, big versions for users on big screens. Cutting image weight is a relatively simple and hugely impactful way to increase performance, and I hope the information outlined above helps you make a difference to your users. One of the biggest impacts we can have is to make our websites more performant, which will improve our users’ experiences and even make our content available to whole new markets. ![]() As designers and developers, we have an enormous amount of power to shape how the web works. Responsive images have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. ![]()
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