Images on the web can be a brilliant user experience enhancement.  Or they can be a serious impediment to users trying to load your pages.  Don’t frustrate your users with gigantic image files.  With just a couple of small, free apps for your Mac, you can process images before adding them to a theme or uploading them to your site as content.

(Sorry, PC users.  We like you, we just don’t own any PCs.)

JPEGMini Lite

JPEGMini Lite dubs itself a “diet for your photos” for good reason.  It can reduce your jpgs by half or more.  The best part is it only takes a few seconds.  Open up the app, drag in a jpg and wah-lah!  Your image is compressed and optimized.  I love watching the file sizes go down as I run jpgs through the app.

Available free from iTunes.

ImageAlpha

What JPEGmini is to jpgs, ImageAlpha is to png files.  ImageAlpha reduces png file sizes "by applying lossy compression and conversion to a more efficient PNG8+alpha format.”  Drag a png file into the editing area, optionally adjust the sliding colors bar and click File > Save As.  Before saving, check the “Optimize with ImageOptim” box to open the companion app (see the next app below).

You can download ImageAlpha for free from the creator’s web site.

Note: The site says version 1.3.5 is for Mac OS X 10.7-10.9, but I’m running it on OS 10.10.3 with no problems.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim compresses image files and can be used alone or in conjunction with ImageAlpha.  It does a wonderful job of squeezing the junk out of pngs.  The decreased file size results in no lose of quality as far as I can see.  (I’ve even run JPEGmini Lite-optimized jpgs through it, and occasionally it will take off a few bytes.)  

You can download ImageOptima for free from the creator’s web site.