# reducing jpg without compromising quality



## Merry_Meet (Jun 4, 2003)

Hello
I just built a fun website for practice. I went to http://www.echoecho.com/toolhtmlinspector.htm and I just ran a check on mywebsite and was warned that my load was way too heavy. (happy - everything else turned out ok)

It seems that I need to reduce the size of some of my jpg's.
I have not applied any compression when saving in fear of losing quality (am I correct there?)

Question
Is there a method I should be addressing, or a particular application?

thank you


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## Cosmic (May 5, 2003)

I have never found reducing the size to be a problem. The loss of quality tends to come more when you want to blow them up.

You might want to double check your croppings. That is one way to reduce the size. Some hosting services give you a recommended size to stay below. 

You could also just leave it as is for a while and have some folks beta test your site for you. A very heavy graphics load is probably going to perform different for different users. Probably work but load very slow for some viewers. Get some feedback, dial up users are used to getting a cup of coffee while something loads.


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## brendandonhu (Jul 8, 2002)

JPEG is a lossy compression format, so compressing it does mean loss of quality. However you can compress a jpeg a fair amount with the loss being barely noticeable. Try it out and see how low you can get the filesize before the image doesn't look good anymore. Also, crop the image to the size it will be displayed on the website instead of using HTML to specify the height and width.


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## Merry_Meet (Jun 4, 2003)

thank you for your reply cosmic
I think I expressed myself incorrectly 

I was hoping that there was a way to reduce the file size not dimensions and still maintain pciture quality.

Does that make a difference in your response?

That test site said that my load time was:
14.4K 106.76 seconds 
28.8K 53.38 seconds 
56K 26.99 seconds 
128K ISDN 11.17 seconds 
1.44MB T1 1.19 seconds 

And that the size of the images was
110616
9177
4730
2548
1256
1214
1174

thank you


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## Merry_Meet (Jun 4, 2003)

Hello again brendandonhu !
You helped me this morning in development!

I have been sizing the image before posting,I try not to let any images go over 425 pixels wide so that they don't make the scroll bar come up (a tip I learned in here somewhere) and then I go in and make sure that there are no checkmarks in the size properties (don't know who told me to do that)

Is it better to apply 50% compression to the 100% image, or keep applying and resaving at 20%. Does that even matter?

thank you


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## brendandonhu (Jul 8, 2002)

Not sure what you mean about the 50% and 20%. If you compress them at 20% you will be losing a lot of quality.


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## Cosmic (May 5, 2003)

Ok, I see your drift. 

Same thing, try it in a test mode until, you don't like the effect and that would be your limit.

Try it out in the real World.


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## nczman (Dec 12, 2000)

I didnt see what OS you have, but the XP Tweak has an image resize which works pretty good. I use it all of the time when I am uploading files to the net.

you can get it from Microsoft. just search for PowerToys and XP. It is one of the downloads.

You just go to the folder, highlight one or the all the jpg's in the folder, right click and then resize. It now has the option for Pocket PC's.


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## Merry_Meet (Jun 4, 2003)

nczman - I am running WindowsMe on a SonyVAIO

brendandonhu - seems the default save on my (multi)applications is 20% for jpg's, especially when I use the 'save for the web' option. I assumed that this what was expexted or a standard. And you are correct it looks poopy.

Cosmic - seems you & all are correct. Just keep fiddling until the file size is relavant to the quality.

I will play the night away and because this is new, to me anyway , I will let you know how I do in a bit.

Thank you all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You've been a help!!!

good night for now
Amy


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## slipe (Jun 27, 2000)

Always start with the original image when you are experimenting. Whenever you save as jpg you create artifacts from the compression. The higher the compression the more artifacts. If you were to open a jpg you had already saved at a medium compression to save at a higher compression you would be multiplying the compression artifacts.


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## yomaddog (Nov 18, 2001)

I've found that just by reducing the # of colors, one can drastically reduce file size. There are many applications that will do this for you.

Here's the one I use: (free!)

http://www.irfanview.com/


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## flyeater (Dec 27, 2000)

> I have not applied any compression when saving


 I take it you know that jpeg is a compression format. It's been the standard for some time now but folks are slowly switching to .png for image compression. Unfortunatly if your site is free web space it may not support many image file types. I know Earthlink only supports .gifs & .jpegs.


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