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Trout's GIF Optimizer
If you're always looking for ways to speed up your website, you might want to consider looking at those bloated GIF files you've got all over the place. Often, simply optimizing your GIF image files can result in the biggest file size reduction in your website, and therefore the biggest speed gain, particularly for users with slower web connections. While GIF optimization is present in the expensive commercial image manipulation packages like Photoshop, often image editing applications neglect to include GIF optimization functionality. Luckily, there's a free download that will do the trick for you: Trout's GIF Optimizer.
Trout's GIF Optimizer will automatically optimize your GIF images in a lossless manner, as well as offer the option to reduce the color depth of your images to see if even smaller sizes can be achieved with as little adverse affect to the original image as possible.
Trout's GIF Optimizer is donationware.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsJordan RunningNov 6th 2006 1:34PM
I'm not sure if I buy the lossless part. While the GIF format is technically capable of more than 256 colors, I've never seen any software that supports it.
Jason ClarkeNov 6th 2006 1:40PM
Yes, Jordan - I should have been more clear. When you're creating a GIF out of another file type, say a JPG or BMP, you may lose quality to get it down to 256 colors. But when you're simply processing a GIF that already exists, the initial optimization doesn't lose any quality.
quantaNov 6th 2006 10:33PM
Seems like a good idea. Although we all should really be using PNGs...and for that I use pngcrush. ;)
jamesNov 7th 2006 2:33PM
Now that IE7 supports PNGs, I have tentatively started to use them. I can not wait until IE6 usage is low enough to allow me to use PNGs more broadly. But even though they are lossy, I still mostly use JPEGs for their compression. How good is this pngcrush quanta mentions?