Here are a few easy steps you can take to reduce the load time of your webpages through optimization of images.
- Reduce the image dimensions. Crop and scale to the largest size that will be needed for your website or for social sharing. I use Croppola.com to crop to 4×3, then GIMP to scale to 800px width.
- Reduce image quality. Use the “Save to Web” feature in Photoshop or the adjust quality settings when exporting an image in GIMP (see link below). Also available is a “Save for web” plugin for GIMP: http://registry.gimp.org/node/33.
- Blur unimportant parts of the image. Make an outline of the focus, most important part of the image. Then Filter > Blur > Blur. Adjust to your liking (cmd + f in Photoshop).
- Do a final, online optimization. Run the image through ImageOptim API.
Post based on this article: https://responsivedesign.is/articles/reducing-image-sizes
Using GIMP: http://orbitingweb.com/blog/optimizing-jpeg-images/
