If your image happens to be a JPEG (JPG), good chance you can compress it to a smaller filesize, saving massive amounts sometimes.

Note that the new standard seems to be PNG, which is undoubtedly higher quality, but boy those filesizes!

The thing about compressing or optimizing a JPEG is that it’s technically a “lossy” solution — the image quality will get worse. Technically. On paper. And I’m not kidding — in my experience that’s really more of an issue when printing the image, but for viewing on screen? Not so much, or even not even noticeable at all, placing it right smack in “Who cares?” territory. Well, yeah, there are the anal folks, but I never consider them. Haters gonna hate.

Point is, if you have a JPEG image, try compressing it with a software tool. See what happens.

I use graphics software on my local machine to do that. But if I’m on a different machine or on mobile and need to do a JPEG compression, here’s a free site online that does the job sufficiently well.

• Compress JPEG

For example, see this issue’s custom banner thumbnail on the right there? Click on it to see it full-size. Well, the original JPEG file was nearly 300K. After I let Compress JPEG do its thing? 60K.

Yeah, there was some very slight degradation in image quality, but that’s me. And I was looking for it. The vast majority of people are barely going to give that image a glance, and the compressed image quality is still way better than what I would consider minimally acceptable for that purpose. Assuming that people can even spot the degradation — I’m pretty sure most can’t.

Bonus tip: Start with a good quality image. Trying to compress a crappy low-res image, or something that was already compressed before, you’ll likely end up with something pretty bad (noisy, dirty, jaggy edges, pixellation, etc.).

Worth a shot, though. And costs nothing. Try it out.

Enjoy today’s featured selections!

— EES