Optimizing your images is one of the key important factors in allowing your site to run smoothly. When your images aren’t optimized they tend to take up chunks of bandwidth and slow the rate your images and pages load on your site. This is usually a number one reason for traffic being driven away. We’ve scaled the web to find 20 Must-Have Image Optimization Tools for Designers that are sure to be a breeze to use. Did we forget any? Let us know in your comment!

Shrink O’Matic

Shrink O’Matic, an Adobe AIR app that’s overal purpose is to resize your images for optimum quality by alolowing you to drag and drop in-between images on your desktop. Features and options such as output formats, output name or the output sizes are encouraged to be used.

Smush.it

Smush.it is another popular (web-based) image optimization tool that allows you to instantly reduce the image file size while preserving quality and pixels. Currently you can SMUSH 5 images at the same time, and you can also install a neat Fire-Fox plugin called Y-Slow to help you optimize images from the comfort of your browser.

Riot

Riot lets you save and optimize various common file formats with the use of a simple and clean graphical user interface. Save for web, print, or email at the highest possible quality, and you’ll also be able to preview images and their projected (advised) size.

PunyPNG

This app utilizes a variety of optimization techniques that return the best quality it could produce. Once you upload an image it will determine the format and what techinique it should use to optimize your image. It will also automatically choose a format for your image if needed.

PNGGauntlet

PNGGauntlet is a .NET app that uses the PNGOUT command (Windows DOS) to optimize PNG files. Based purely on the optimization of PNG files, it is also able to convert JPG, GIF, TGA, PCX and BMP formats into PNG files.

Image Optimizer

Using Image Optimizer you’re able to easily resize, compress and optimize your images no matter the format. Their images are more-so optimized for web use, which is a pretty nifty tool for web designers since we’re constantly looking for easier ways to optimize a websites image. You can edit the image size you’d like the app to resize it to, and there’s also a desktop version as well.

JPG & PNG Stripper

This application does exactly as it says, it works to strip, remove, and clean-up any unnecessary metadata that may be “impairing” your image files. Formats supported include JPG, JFIF and PNG file formats.

EasyCropper

EasyCropper is a simple and free way to quickly crop all of your images for meant for web use. You can begin uploading the image and then set the desired height and width. Next, your images come out cropped and ready for web use!

Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

This online image optimizerallows you to optimize images that are a variety of formats. The most recognizable formats are GIF, JPG and PNG. 1) You can upload the image from your hard drive or 2) You can paste the URL the image and automatically upload it. You’re also able to convert one image format to the other and the only limitations you have is 200KB per file, and only one coversion at a time.

SuperGIF

SuperGIF, a desktop app for Mac and Windows users effortlessly makes all your GIF images and animations smaller. SuperGIF pumps out images over 50% smaller, and it does an even better job with GIF animations that usually get you anywhere to 80% or so smaller.

Web Resizer

Web Resizer helps you optimize pictures, images for websites and email campaigns. It lets you crop, resize, add a border and sharpen your images with the click of a few buttons. You can also take advantage of useful features such as image rotation, resampling filters, color conversion (sepia or black and white) and built-in zip compression to create a zip folder containing all of your processed images.

PNGCrushrrr

PNGCrushrrr is a Mac OS X application that allows you to optimize any of your PNG images, and then ready’s them for sending or uploading to the web. This Mac app works best on 24-bit PNGs and with images saved from Apple’s Preview. It comes with the support of multiple files that can be easily dropped to compress.

Super PNG

Super PNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for compressing PNG (”ping”) files without having to open up your browser or any additonal applications on your desktop. It supports all the PNG format and includes some advanced options such as 16-bit color support, variable compression, gamma correction and meta data saving, and since a large portion of designers already use PhotoShop, this is a natural choice.

iResize

iResize is a fast and effecient online tool used for resizing images for free. It allows you to reduce the size of your images by bytes and pixels, without any issues. It’s pretty much a straight-forward application with ease-of-use.

Resizr

Resizr takes care of your online image cropping, darkening, lightening, and format conversion needs. You can even use it to resize images and post them to social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.

WebGraphics Optimizer

This tool is great for optimizing and compressing images strictly for web use. The images can be reduced in size to increase the speed of your website. It also recognizes transparency while loading an image and also the last directory used for opening or saving image files. And it supports 38 graphic formats including EMF, CLP,DXF, XPM, IFF,PBM, CUT, XWD, PLT, DGN, XBM, ITG and more!

GIFBOT

GIFBOT enables you to compress any GIF or JPEG graphic at an instant. All you need to do is enter the URL of the graphic/image you want to compress, and then you’ll receive multiple variations of that image to choose from. You will see all the different graphics on one page, together with the original file. 

StanleyShilov

You can use the StanleyShilov web app to swiftly compress/convert images into JPG image format. It will convert almost any image format and it will contain the best quality possible.

ResizeImage.Org

What’s more to say except the fact that ResizeImage is one of the most simplist and easiet image optimizing tools that exist. The web-interface is extremely clean and easy to interact with.

JPEG Cleaner

And last, but never least, is JPG Cleaner, a simple yet powerful utility for cleaning and freeing JPG files from anything that isn’t picture data related. Common and popular programs such as Illustrator or Gimp usually write additional information into your JPG files that simply aren’t needed. Remove the image waste with JPEG Cleaner!