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Often us photographers think we did a pretty good job with optimizing our different picture files, but then when a text editor is used we are able to see that they still contain a ton of data that can actually be removed.  Yep, there are different programs out there that can be used to extract this information from the different GIFs, PNGs, or JPEGs, and still allow the photo look great, but many of these programs require a pretty specific knowledge to use them.  Unless the user knows what they are doing when it comes to command-line tools, they are pretty much out of luck. Until now.

Two members from the Yahoo exceptional performance team, Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, took what they knew of these tools and built a single application called Smush.it that does all the optimizations for you in just one place.  Completely cloud-based, it allows you to upload images, give the image a URL, or use it as a Firefox extension.  The program shows you how many bytes you’ll save, and then gives you the images as .zip file for you to replace them on your site.

The program uses image magick to determine which file is which, and also to convert GIFS to PNGs.  It uses pngcrush for PNGs, and jpgegtran for JPEGs.  At this point, it does erase all metadata, which may cause some concern, especially among the actual photographers since copyright information would be stripped out.  Web developers who would be using the program may not have as much of an issue with this fact.  Then again, it’s pretty easy for someone to lift a photo from the web anyway if it’s not watermarked.

To smush your stuff, visit the smush.it page.

Via [delicious] and [ajaxian]

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