JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver

Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has posted an article entitled "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". An article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on bandwidth and please viewers at the same time with quicker loading webpages. They also talk briefly at JPEG2000."

More advice

[kindbud]

Computers can make problems requiring complex repetitive calculations a much less onerous task to solve. I highly recommend that people apply computers to difficult scientific questions.

JPG?

[ar1550]

Compression? I'd just been renaming my .bmp's to .jpg - you mean I actually have to "compress" them to a .jpg to gain any benefit? Wow, my readers will sure be pleased. Next, you'll be telling me that my Flash-only websites should use shapes & instances instead of manually manipulating every pixel.

Power Switch - The Energy Saver

[wadetemp]

In other news:

Anonymouse Cowarde has posted an article entitled "Power Switch - The Energy Saver". An article for geeks and computer owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of power they use by turning off your computer when you're not using it, using one of the most common buttons found on the front of most PCs. If you own a computer and don't yet have knowledge in the field of energy, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on electricty and please your significant other at the same time with a quieter room and lower energy bill. They also talk briefly at APM.

What's the best way to speed up your connection?

[NanoGator]

Q: What's the best way to speed up your connection?
A: Run less data through it.

I can write an article about this if Slashdot is interested.

LOL

[Dwedit]

As you can see from the 25:1 compressed image above, there is really not much of a difference in terms of image quality from the original image at 2:1 - but a save of 44.6kb in file size. Consider this as a practical example - a new piece of content you post has ten images in it, for simplicity reasons at 63.2kb each (632kb in total), we save a total of 465kb, seemingly not a great deal on an individual basis.

Now say 2000 different people read that same review uncached, we save a total of roughly 908mb in outbound data bandwidth for that single review. If 5000 people were to read that review, we are talking gigabytes of bandwidth which can be saved through compression, 2.27gb to be exact. I'll let the stunning numbers speak for themselves.

Sorta ironic how thousands of people are downloading that article right now!

This will be a common conversation...

[Navius Eurisko]

Web Designer 1: "Hey, this JPG compression will save our average 56k user about 5 seconds on load time."

Web Designer 2: "That's means we can load even more useless content on our website and they won't notice the difference!"

Web Designer 1: "As well as include more popup and banner ads, too!"

aw shit!

[paradesign]

you mean i shouldnt have been using TIFs this entire time?!? no wonder my site loads so slow.

i use LZW, if that helps?

Re:Calling a cat a cat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wholehartely agree. Can an editor change the title to "image/jpeg Compression"?

Whoops!

[CaseyB]

Pardon me, I seem to have accidentally stepped into a conversation from 10 YEARS AGO.

Re:Wayback machine

[GigsVT]

Man, now I am going to have to redesign my page to get rid of all those uncompressed TIFFs.

Re:Calling a cat a cat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but using "JPG" instead of "JPEG" saves a byte of bandwidth.

Re:More advice

[Admiral Mouse]

And get this... apparently images are not the only things that computers can compress. I've just learned that there are a slew of programs out there that can compress text-data with amazing ratios.

Staggering.

Now if only...

[ZoneGray]

Now if only they could convince people to build pages that have fewer than 100 GETs, it might actually make a difference.

Re:JPG?

[kzinti]

You laugh, but I do have a couple pictures I've gotten of people over the years ... that are small (res wise) .JPGs, about 400-600kb each.

Reminds me of the friend who wanted to know why his page of family photo thumbnails was taking so long to load. He was using JPEG files, and was shrinking them down to 128x128, but the page was still taking many minutes to load. I took a look at his HTML, and saw that each thumbnail was specified as <img src="p000001.jpg" width="128" height="96">, etc. The trouble was that p0000001.jpg was the full-resolution image! Each one weighed about 500K. He had "shrunk" them by changing the width and height in the img tag - in other words, the browsers were downloading twelve or so full-size images then scaling them into thumbnails. The good part was that clicking on a thumbnail, to see the full image, was instantaneous as the full image was already in the browser's cache.

I didn't have the heart to tell him how clueless his page was.

--Jim

A better title for this...

[rossz]

would be "Stating the fucking obvious."

Jeez. Why is this on slashdot?

The pain of rejection

[Sloppy]

I submitted this story in 1990 and it was rejected. What gives?

Who wants to bet Mr. Tweak is Hemos' pal?

[Blaede]

Mr. Tweak "submitting" a story about his own site, and Hemos going "yeah, now this is TECH!!!!!!!!!!"? Or is Tweaktown allied with /. in some way? No one reads this site anymore for the info, the reader comments are the most entertaining now. /. has become a joke regarding tech news.

Re:JPG?

[jsprat]

Those aren't thumbnails,
they're dumbnails!

NEXT ON SLASHDOT

[cygnus]

new headline: "Attracting user attention with the <BLINK> tag!"

Hey its 4/20

[gad_zuki!]

*Hemos and buds in a smoke filled room*

"Dude, this image is only 20 fucking kilobytes big."

"Whoa."

"Damn."

"You just blew my mind."

"POST IT!"

Re:More advice

[darien]

I sspct lssy cmprssion s rthr mr ntcbl wth txt thn wth pctrs.