Compressing pictures on your blog

One of the things that attracts people to a blog is the use of good pictures. The downside is the more pictures you use, the slower the pages of your blog load. The slower pages load, the faster people will leave your blog.

Most of the pictures I use, are originally 100 to 200 Kbyte. I would have an average of about 10-15 on the 'home page' of my blog. Each of them is stored on Flickr.
I use either ADSL or cable for my Internet connection, but even then, I could see the time delays in loading the pictures. Google Analytics, which I use to track my blog statistics, shows me that while most of the people visiting my blog use T1, ADSL or cable, which 'minimizes' the download delays, 10% of my "audience" still uses dial-up lines. Good enough reason to ensure the pages download fast.

For months, I fiddled around with different picture packages to compress images before publishing them. It was a lot of manual work, to reduce the resolution and the dimensions to make a real difference, and often the result was not the quality I wanted (better no pictures than bad pictures), or was just too much of an effort (hey, I have a day job too, you know! ;-)). If you visit some of my pre-2008 posts, you will see what I mean. (I wished I had the time and courage to resize all of those pictures!)

I stumbled upon ShrinkPic, a shareware tool from Onthegosoft which helped me to resize pictures easily.

I wrote a short tutorial about it.

Enjoy!