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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."
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.
Edith Keeler Must Die
i am on 14k4 :(
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.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
It's unfortunate that the JPEG format ends up being described as the JPG, due to DOS naming constraints. Are we doom to see the usage of 3 name extension only in the future due to this lack of vision from the early implementers? I for one would tend to favor embedded MIME support and the removing of file extensions.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
umm... huh... I was hoping there might be a news article here.
I've started to care a lot less about server-side bandwidth with the dawn of free web-hosting.
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.
It's fairly simple. Use JPEG for photos, where the compression artifacts won't be noticeable and the bandwidth savings are most helpful. Use PNG for computer-generated stuff like screenshots, and run them though pngcrush (always use the highest compression for PNG's that you make available for download; because they're lossless, you don't lose any quality).
Has this become uncommon knowledge already?
When are we going to start evolving these algorithims? It would have to be done by a really fast computer, but it's been shown that natural selection applies to computing as well. I'd imagine that it is possible to come up with an algorithim that's lossless and still as small as any equivalent .jpg file. Nature can come up with things we never even imagined. This technique has been used to create a sorting program that is smaller works faster than any we ever created manually. And we often can't figure out how it works. Not a clue!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Short run down of the linked-to article:
Non-compressed images have a large filesize and cost a lot of bandwidth, compressed images look almost as good and cost less bandwidth.
Guide to compress images in PSP 7: save, move slider.
conclusion: compressing is good, hope you found this useful.
*shakes his head sadly* Slow down are fine, but c'mon - we're geeks you know; we can be expected to at least know *some* things...
Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second. GIFs should be used for vector based graphics and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right. Many non-professional webpages confuse the distinction and make solely jpg or gif based websites. He should also have explained the compression techniques using photoshop as that is a much more popular package (although I understand that many home grown websites might be using PSP, they are also the ones that don't really care about bandwidth since they're using geocities or other free hosts).
JPEG has been around almost as long as I can remember the Internet. I remember spending long hours downloading single pr0n pics from Lynx using the Kermit protocol. Too bad half of 'em were zipped bitmap files instead of JPEGs.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It's JPEG, dammit! Never has been "JPG [sic]", never will be. The dropped e is a figment of history from the days of 8.3 DOS filenames, and Unix never had that limitation (although there was 11 character limits), using "JPG" on a pro-open-source website is not only insultive, it is offensive to loyal Unix users.
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.
"Derp de derp."
Slow days, slow days... not slow down. :)
Though I should slow down with typing. No time though - must read more pointless articles...
Gah, and then of course I replied within the two minute delay with the "Slow Down Cowboy!" message - how appropriate.
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!
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!"
This is hardly news for the /. crowd. Isn't it supposed to be "News for Nerds"?. More interesting, IMHO, is the fact that Photoshop is out for MacOS X. I'll be interested in what effect this has on the uptake of the OS, and whether it might ever lead to Photoshop on *NIX.
i use LZW, if that helps?
I want 2D games back.
Why does it feel like 1994 all over again?
JPEG'ing images has been par for the course for any competant web designer since the very incarnation of the WWW.
This is like having a 'news' article to the effect of
"Make your HTML code smaller! Learn what the tags actually are and throw out FrontPage!"
Oooo gee, wow!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Somebody modded the parent post here down as off-topic. Would a moderator please re-read the post?
a.) It was on topic
b.) It was funny
"Derp de derp."
For slashdot, I would expect at least something on the order of a tutorial, or perhaps some study on a better compression method for jpeg. obviously 99% of the readers here know that jpeg can be compressed.
Interesting that this would be posted no less than three days after Penny Arcade's screenshot rant from Wednesday.
I have to say that I agree with Tycho and Gabe on this one. All too often I'm seeing websites post crappy images claiming that they show intricate detail of upcoming software, yet they compress it to the point that it looks like it came out of one of these.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Oh well, maybe I'll write an article about how to reduce size of GIF files using a smaller color pallete and turning off dithering so it can compress better... :-(
This article needs to be shown to just about every web graphics shop out there, but not to us self-righteous nerds! :)
I think he had a valid point. This article really does get filed under 'Duh'. There's a difference between having a negative opinion and trying to be offensive.
Frankly, I agree with him.
"Derp de derp."
Pardon me, I seem to have accidentally stepped into a conversation from 10 YEARS AGO.
What a useless slashdot post.
:P
1) That website provided little to no useful info for the average webmaster - who, if they haven't heard of JPG compression, don't deserve that title.
2) Poor Tweaktown is trying to save bandwidth, so what we do... we SlashDot 'em. Poor bastards probably wish JPG2000 was out yesterday
3) They'd save even more money if they lost the banner advertizements
Well at least I get to write this lame post on Slashdot which will be loaded by hundreds of thousands of people each wasting exactly 560 bytes of Slashdot's bandwdith. Mwahaha
In the conclusion, the author mentions GIF. But what about .PNG? Yes, I know that JPEG as a rule of thumb is better than PNG for photo-like images. But for many images... indeed for anything smaller than ~100x100 pixels, but also in random cases for bigger images, .PNG is better than JPEG. Even images that appear to be very complex, and images that don't do well at all as .GIF's, sometimes turn out EXCELLENT as .PNG's, way smaller than JPEGs and with perfect quality.
This is not the case for their sample image, but, umm, I'd just like have said anyway that some people are way too quick to save their pics as blurry JPEGs without trying the alternatives.
Yatta! We are the wad of dough! Who dong hide?
Translation: "All right! We are the world! We just go to bed."
These are lyrics from "Yatta!" by Happatai (the Japanese version of the Village People), as interpreted in "Irrational Exuberance", a popular Flash music video of the song.
Surprisingly, the parent is somewhat on-topic because Flash videos use JPEG compression technology to save bandwidth.
Now, I can understand if slashdot wants to put techie reviews or such other geek stuff. That's understandable, in the case of YRO, company product release (that april spoof about sponsoring products was true, wasnt it?), and software issues.
HOWEVER, this is a geek site, which we talk as deeply as going about SMP on x86 systems and remodding systems into other cases (mechanics and engineering, lest that be software or hardware). However, that journalistic line (if there even was that line) has been crossed with this idiotic article. Let's re-read this again to see if it doesnt state the obvious. Also, I'm going to _assume_ that techie people on this website (most all) knows that jpeg is a compression....
Compression - The Bandwidth Saver
Hell, even non-techie people still know that if I zip that file, it doesnt take as long.... This article just insults our intelligence. Slashdot is becoming more and more like TechTV for the net.
And as a last mote, moderators, pay attention to *important stuff* below every post. This article is anything but offtopic.
Not safe for work BTW.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Come one, this is so stupid!
./'s readers could actually _implement_ JPEG if they where given the standard.
I thought the JPEG vs GIF and later JPEG vs PNG thing had been resolved _years_ ago!
How did this get into the front page?
This should be "News for Nerds."; does the editor honestly think that an average geek (nerd) wouldn't know this stuff already? I bet a number of
While compressing your images should be right up there on the Web designer 101 course, sometimes I despair that the wrong types of compression are chosen.
JPEG is an excellent compression method for photographic images, both colour and greyscales. The image distortion is not noticeable by most people even at high compression ratios and the resulting image is close enough to the original.
JPEG is NOT an excellent compression method for line diagrams, maps and bitmaps featuring a limited colour palette - the artifacts created by the transforms used by the algorithms blur rapid changes in colour and can make text unreadable. Even worse, for most diagrams, PNG lossless compression yields smaller results because of the limited palette and large amount of redundancy inherent in the data.
JPEG 2000 promises even better compression ratios with superior image quality. Wavelet compression methods tend to reduce the amount of blur caused by the discrete cosine transforms and are better at handling rapid changes in colours. But that doesn't mean that it is a blanket solution.
I also look forward to the day when SVG is a widely available and widely supported browser option. We can all benefit when complex layouts can be described in terms of vectors and colour fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps for the classic web page touches like 3D colour balls and arrows. That will also save bandwidth while increasing the flexibility and variety of images on the web.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The article didn't discuss the merits of other formats vs. JPEG enough. Namely, non-photograhic images, with few colors and mostly large solid areas, such as icons, bullets, line drawings, diagrams, charts, etc. are not optimal for JPEG.
In such cases, GIF and PNG will yield much better compression than JPEG, and also look nicer, since they're lossless. Compressing such images with JPEG will give you ugly "ringing" artifacts, since the lines are essentially infinite-frequency "spikes" which you can't capture completely.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
We should keep this quiet. If advertisers figure it out, we'll get even more pop up windows, crammed with more crap than ever before, because it'll be cheaper. Keep them using bitmaps! Or Gifs even!
Because this one would be (Score: -1, Redundant)!
Sure, PhotoShop is nice - if you're running a Mac or Microsoft Windows(TM) box and a grand laying around. Paint Shop Pro is pretty nice, does most of what PhotoShop does for a tenth the price - if you're suffering under a MS OS. But hey, you can download GIMP for FREE. Heck, they even have a Microsoft Windows(TM) port. Sure, you can't save GIFs or dick with TIFFs, nor can you do a lot of stuff you can do in PhotoShop.
However, GIMP is great for most image manipulation needs.
An article from www.tweaktown.com, submitted by Mr Tweak, who happens to be the webmaster of www.tweaktown.com. Next thing we know, we will be getting articles about stretching your anus from George Oatse, who happens to be the webmaster of goatse.cx
Now if only they could convince people to build pages that have fewer than 100 GETs, it might actually make a difference.
As can be easily sdeen from this article, Hemos has no idea what a computer is and is currently on a tropical island approving stories by avain carrier(and not even ip, but Lan Mangaer 2.x). Therefore we must IMPEACH HEMOS
Has ZDTV or CNET News.com bought out Slashdot or something? I seem to have missed the annoucement...
I got trapped into clicking the link to the article, thinking it could be something useful about jpeg compression and how it works. The story certainly implied that. How disappointed I was, and I agree with most people that this is one of the dumbest stories ever. This kind of story belongs in a site for amateur wanna-be web designers, not geeks. Anyway, since I've gotten all caught up in this, and you're here too, maybe we can have a useful discussion on How JPEG Compression Works.
:), only the associated values need to be stored. I believe the first image deals with how much darker the left half is than the right half of the image, the second does the same thing horizontally, the third deals with how much darker the leftmost quarter of the image and the third quarter of the image are darker than the other two, and so on...
I am by no means an expert, and I believe this is a gross simplification of the process, but here is what I think happens. The jpg alg breaks the image apart into 8 pixel by 8 pixel subimages. (Don't ask how it handles pictures that are not n*8 x m*8 in size). Then it treats each of those images with a process very similar to principal component analysis, where a set of representative images are given associated multipliers of how much of that image to add into the reconstructed original image the user is trying to get. These representative images are ordered from least to most detailed, and since they are known to both the compressor and the uncompressor (depressor?
So how does one adjust image quality / compression? Well every possible 8 x 8 picture can be represented with 64 of these representative images. However, since the 64th deals with *really* minute details, then you can get a decent reconstruction using just 63. It all depends on the image you are trying to compress, but can probably get away with even just the first 20 of the basis images. Oh, for the record, I'm talking about grayscale here. I think you'd need to ramp things up by a factor of 3 to do rbg.
If someone wants to fill in any gaps or factual inaccuracies, certainly do so.
How'd something like this get slashdotted? Shouldn't a web site that deals with quantum mechanics, astrophysics, supercomputers, wireless networking standards, etc. be beyond "jpeg" compression? Thank you for wasting 5 minutes of my life and telling me that you can compress jpegs. Sorry if this seems like flame, but someones got to say something.
If so, when will this bloody patent expire?
I thought the patent expired last year, but I have read contradictory information all over the place.
FWIW: slight addendum.
In PS7, choose "Save for Web-->Jpeg" and not "Save-->Jpeg"
Why? The images come out significantly smaller / more optimized -- and, specifically for those of us on the Mac, don't have the extra 16k of resource fork / icon data.
--dr00gy
If this statement is true, you probably aren't reading it on Slashdot.
This is slightly off topic but almost anyone can compress text, too. Of course, JPG compression is better than text compression but every little bit counts.
You can download a copy of mod_gzip here for Apache.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
MP3 compression !
I cannot even imagine what would happens to bandwidth if all MP3 files will be uncompressed... Total slashdotting probably
Jesus, come on here Slashdot, why the hell would you post this as a frontpage item? This is like posting 'Newbies Guide to Webpages'. Lets use a little more discression when posting stuff, esp rediculous crap like this. If your reading slashdot and you do not have any knowledge of JPEG compression, you should probably kill yourself for the greater good of humanity. This is some basic stuff that even my little bros (who only know how to browse the web, talk with friends on AIM, and make basic webpages) are familiar with. Don't insult us with this sort of material.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
As an ISP company I find it very offensive that such advents in technology will cost us money in lost sales revenues. :) Sweet article!
Since reading about this revolutionary JPEG format I am appalled that the ISPs are not lobbying the government for an injunction on this technology. It says 25:1 reduction in bandwidth.....does this mean our revenues will fall by a factor of 25 if all our customers adapt this new technology? That is appalling. What can we do to stop this?
-
This just in: things that cost less save you money! Oh was I stating the obvious. Sound familiar though? Compression saves you bandwidth!
Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.
In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
GIFs should be used for vector based graphics
No they shouldn't. Use PNG for still images. Use SWF (now an open format) or MNG (not much browser support yet but works in Mozilla and Konqueror) for animations.
and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right.
PNG can be 10% smaller than GIF when crushed properly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At my last job, we wondered why our carefully tuned images looked like shit on AOL. We found they were recompressing our jpegs to make them much smaller (and thus lower quality). So we now send AOL really high quality jpegs so that our images don't get trashed as badly by AOL.
Plato seems wrong to me today
it was possible not to know about jpeg compression.
Lossy compression is evil, it is the polution of our time. But, like the polution of the real world, without it we would be held back, just as without cars and planes and factories we would be held back too.
Bad compression artifacts and degredation after generations of compression and editing piss me off more than anything in the world.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
A story submitted by "Mr.Tweak" about a website called TweakTown. So those Slashvertisements weren't an April fool prank, hmm? If anyone would like to personally voice their disgust with Mr. Cameron "Tweak" Wilmot over this obvious co-opting of Slashdot, why don't you give him or a call or drop by? I'm sure he'd appreciate it.
Wilmot, Cameron
camwilmot@tweaktown.com
295 Manifold Street
Camperdown, VIC 3260 AU
61355932666
I didn't read your message because it seemed dumb and off-topic but all I can say is I agree: I think we should use JPEG compression on Rumsfeld -- I think we'd get some good results.
_
WINDOWS USERS CLICK HERE!
Hey, the RIAA seems to have people trolling Slashdot now, so articles on the basics are necessary.
http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html is a great free website that can compress your JPEGs (and GIFs)...I use it all the time for the images on my site.
Orange
Is this really supposed to be news?
I thought this has become common knowledge, but there's a bitmap compression format called DjVu invented at the AT&T Labs in 1998 which has significant advantages over the currently popular formats (JPEG, PDF, etc.). They advocate that their format is best suited for scanned documents.
Its new for idiot or geocities website builders now apparently.
He doesn't appear to know a lot about what he's talking about. He calls a jpeg saved at 25% compression "25:1", where in fact the quality setting has direct relationship with file sizes.
Here are some tips I've found over the years of putting together web sites:
Slashdot announces that selection of articles for publication has been contracted out the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It would be interesting, if it'd been written and posted in 1992, rather than 2002.
I don't know who i'm most disappointed in.
A - Tweaktown, for posting such an inane article in the first place
B - MrTweak, for relaying it to slashot. Of course, he probably wrote it.
C - Hemos for posting it.
I mean really... the whole thing reeks of MrTweak wanting more site traffic and turning to slashdot with a story about anything to get it. Like "oh my god, i didn't know i could COMPRESS graphics?"
Proposal to slash: never accept submissions from people with obvious links to the article in question...
Wasnt that originally the idea for Jpeg?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
would be "Stating the fucking obvious."
Jeez. Why is this on slashdot?
-- Will program for bandwidth
I submitted this story in 1990 and it was rejected. What gives?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
from webopedia: "JPEG: Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression."
Photoshop used to be available for IRIX, so its not REALLY the first *NIX version. The IRIX version used to be INSANELY expesive, though, relative to its PC/Mac counterparts. I think they discontinued it somewhere around the 3.0 rev.
Thank dimwits for "enabling" bmp images in your pos browser.. they are soooo fit for Net use...
Guiness Book of World records:
If you want to save bandwidth, just nuke the trash various image editing tools leave in the .jpg file. (E.g., use jpegtrans(1))
Maybe you want to keep thumbnails in images on your development system, but all they do is burn bandwidth on the production system. You can usually reduce the size by a significant amount, even if you decide to add your own copyright messages, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I used to have a C&C:TS site, and there were many people who commented that my site loads like lightning comparing to other sites. Guess what kind of compression I used?
wake up sandbag.
readme
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.
I heard some details, for example that his body was partially decomposed. Slashdotters can certainly relate to being so friendless and unimportant that nobody would even notice if they keeled over dead some day. Heck, if RMS died in his apartment even the smell wouldn't tip off the neighbors since they wouldn't notice any difference from the usual stench.
Strikes me as ironic the amount of EXTRA bandwidth is been used by having slashdot users flood over there...
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
If you do why not submit it to Web Monkey?
Video Game cheats, hints a
This is my only explanation for an article like this. Some got in and posted this article for fun.
All this time I've been using .psd for all my images on my websites. Compression, what a novel idea!
Image sizes have no impact on surfing today. Back in the day when most people had a 56k or slower modem, 100k images were painful to deal with. These days it's large java applications, flash advertisements and streaming media that impact your bandwidth. JPG2000 would have been really interesting back in, say, 1997 or before.
Slashdot. News for Retards, Stuff that's Obvious.
FASTER LOADING pr0n!!!!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Did you mean JPEG?
I once had a die-hard mac user tell me that "JPEG" pictures evolved on the mac, because they had a four letter name, and type and creator info on mac files was four letters long. Nevermind that it was named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression...
Then I'm happy to inform you that you have WON a FREE LIFETIME ACCOUNT on CCDoubler.com!!! Just enter your credit card number in the blank, and you will get your credit limit DOUBLED automatically FOREVER!!!!
So cool, you should sign up now!
And everything you charge to your credit card will get automatically refunded immediately!!! IT's so COOL you'd have to be CRAZY to not sign up!!!
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
what on earth is going on?
this is an article on how to move a slider. i would hope the fact that sliders are moveable is not news to any nerds.
the only thing this article did for me was confirm that WinXP is ugly as hell which I don't think is really groundbreaking news either...
when i first saw this i though perhaps it was talking about zipping jpegs, which i just learned recently can save quite a bit of space (esp on ones created in photoshop)
then i kept reading.. wtf is this doing on slashdot..
doesnt everyone who has used the www more than twice know what a jpeg is?
You may also write an article for them about how to nest table-tags correctly.
With my browser the article was somewhere south-east of the "vote for this site" ad.
It's really annoying to have to use IE only because this special error condition isn't already handled by your alternative browser.
Why can't people use JPEG instead of JPG ... is it so hard to type that one extra letter?!
....
It annoys me a lot when I see 'index.htm' or 'picture.jpg'.
But then I'm easily annoyed
new headline: "Attracting user attention with the tag!"
Just raise the taxes on crack.
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.
...
... I forget now ... :/
There's a reason JPEG is one of the most common formats on the web, and that's
Dang
Lol, ya.
Smart site that, setting the style on their body text so that in Mozilla it's teeny-tiny. This form of compression saves the reader from time otherwise spent scrolling the screen. It saved me the time of even reading at all.
What ever did happen to the idea that the Web is about letting the user set their browser's default type size to suit their eyes, and writing pages that honor the user's preference?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Interesting that this article is submitted by its author. Obviously, by scouring the web looking for informative and interesting articles, we've been barking up the wrong tree. Instead, we should be slipping Hemos a few $$$'s to drive traffic to our website.
How does the JPEG group make their money? Do they enforce a MP3-style licencing scheme, or is it a group effort of companies and organizations who would mutually benefit?
slashdot!=valid HTML
I guess that he could have saved a lot of bandwidth by not writing the article and not getting linked to by slashdot. :)
There goes all his efforts to save bandwidth down the drain. All those hours for nothing.
my sig
thanks for this article. .psd files were not so popular.
I was wondering why my
Now I know it's because not many people are using the web browser plugin to photoshop.
Also they must not have 100Mb/s internet access to view my 200MB+ 40960x40960 graphics.
thanks again
Hopefully the web server knows enough not to send the resource fork to the client.
Is this really as obvious as I think it is?
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
I'll bet you save lots of space by zipping your mp3s too. Damn, if you're saving space by zipping your jpegs, then you're making them wrong.
I hear that .gif format thingy does wonders too. Now if they could just invent something to compress datafiles and audio, we'd really be able to get cooking with this web thing.
Come on...I thought I was reading Slashdot, not Duh Magazine...
Almost thought I made a typo... ... nope... right place.
/dev/null way ??? Please...
slashdot.org
Can somebody compress this story the
Or is Hemos just doing an experiment on us?
"hmmm... let's see how I can get those geeks to rebel a little, get them to turn on something else than microsoft, or running into flamewars.. let's have a real community spirit, by all having the same opinion"...
Ok Hemos... you succeeded... now get this thing out of here.
Yes, this article states the obvious... but since we're on the subject...
If you want to compress your JPEG's but don't have Paint Shop Pro, go to the JPEG Wizard site. It has an online utility that lets you see different levels of compression on your picture, so you can pick the one that is smallest that still looks good enough.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
when i first saw this i though perhaps it was talking about zipping jpegs, which i just learned recently can save quite a bit of space (esp on ones created in photoshop)
I think the same result could be obtained by selecting the "exclude non-image data" option when saving jpeg files in photoshop.
That's for photoshop 5.0 and 5.5 I think - In photoshop 6.0 just make sure not to check the "thumbnail" option. Don't have a clue about 7, but the pattern should be obvious.
If you're already doing this then I don't see how zipping a jpeg file could save more space than perhaps 1-3%
Be careful - this sort of article might lead to designers replacing text with .jpg images of the text.
DAMN! TOO LATE!
they were saved using save for web in photoshop 6
i didnt realize that was the *wrong* way to do it
i was zipping a whole website and just happened to notice that some of the jpegs were compressed up to 20%
I suggest adding a new criterion to the article screening process. Imagine that the article had been posted on April First. If seems like a lame April Fools joke then maybe it shouldn't be posted.
Oh yeah, no mention was made of Portable Net Graphics (PNG) file format and it's lossless compression, or any of the fine free software that utilizes it, GIMP, Electric Eyes, etc.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Apache has the ability to serve up every page gzipped from disk, on the fly, and since most web browsers automatically gunzip data streams that don't end in .gz, this saves bandwidth all over the place.
-Serp
PNG is only for only for ANIME!
Until porn sites start using PNG the public won't ever hear of it. DUH
*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!"
PSP7 != PS7.
PSP7 = Paint Shop Pro AFAIR
This is my last post.... ...and jpg 2000 to come but I find myself in front of a article showing how to compress an image with a stupid windows software.
.jpg or .jpeg....ask your administrator which mime type to use.
/. seems to suck more and more on topic choice.
Are you paid by topic you publish?
I was expecting a good 'technical' article about jpg
Hooo, and BTW, you have to name your image
In other news...
* Disconnecting the ethernet cable from your computer cuts down bandwidth usage to 0.
* Not posting a website cuts down your bandwidth to 0.
* Turning off your computer saves power
* Eating food reduces hunger
I hope you get the drift... Come on, these are common sense things, why do they have to be slashdot articles?
Brielle
Joint Photographic Experts Group (http://www.jpeg.org/public/jpeghomepage.htm).
:-(
JPG is the DOS filename extension, not the picture compression standard's name, I suppose.
Better luck the next time, Slashdot
All these uncompressed TIFFs are making my web browsing a really slow experience.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
dont care to lose some quality while your at it? :)
convert to microsoft-GIF convert to ASCII...and you should end up with a 250*256 bit at most sized (unless i'm mistaken here) image...which can be resized by H(x) html tags or other things for web, or just plain compressed and left like that
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Katz has started writing technical articles!
Iexplore still can't render any PNG image with the least bit of transparent decency.
IE 6 on my machine handles indexed PNG images that use binary (not alpha) transparency just fine. This means that it will properly handle almost all PNGs converted from GIF, as GIF supports only binary transparency and only 255 colors per frame. (IE will not be able to handle PNGs converted from transparent high-color GIF images, that is, GIF images that use multiple frames, each with their own palettes, to draw 4,096 colors.)
You're right that IE 6 will screw up any other transparent PNG image though. But why, on a web site with a solid-color background, do you really need a transparent image? Yes, I know about the "PNG on top of JPEG" hack for site logos, but that typically uses an indexed PNG, putting any drop shadow or halo in the JPEG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
at first i wondered why this was posted to slashdot, but I slowly came to the realisation that this is a subtle bid to get rid of the recently added advertisements to slashdot.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Ummm I'm pretty sure that a month or two ago when the new advertising policy was announced on /. there was also mention of having "advertisement posts" - i.e. fake posts that were actually paid customer content. I also recall there being a limit of one of these per day or per something (week?). So I reckon that is what this post is - our very first infommercialpost.
- everyone who works in your avarage office knows that pictures, such as bmp's and screen captures from the clipboard (in windoze) are much BETTER handled by pasting them into an ultra-efficient format such as DOC. This is then PERFECT for emailing, especially to work-at-home folks, connected at 28.8k via direct dial in lines...
Don't say this is BAD, it keeps me EMPLOYED - explaining to folks what's 'wrong' with their email...
Why bother with inconveniencing web authors in any way(though I'll admit that using JPGs is hardly a huge inconvenience when most already use it) when you can just install mod_gzip on the web server, and use anything from a 8 bit GIF to a 24 bit BMP(sans compression at the file level) and get relatively good compression regardless?
It's been a long time.
Check out the source for the page: 14 gifs, a bit of flash, not a single jpeg image!
SWF is owned and developed by Macromedia ... ming, libswf and all the other possibly open code projects are just a set of libs which can output flash player compatible "movies" ... flash is still very much so controlled by macromedia and therefore it is not "open"
I find it very anoying when maps are converted to jpegs and loose important detail. Some intelligence is required when choosing a format to store images with.
What's a JPEG? That article goes a little over my head.
This is the stupidest fucking story I've ever read on Slashdot.
If they couldn't impeach Clinton why would they even consider impeaching Bush. Clintons crimes were way worse than your mere distaste for Bush.
Clinton may have commited more actual "crimes" but W. Bush is the greater scumbag...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Additionally, basic JPEG sucks and I don't condone singing its praises. It introduces artifacts and destroys the image. It might be fine for pretty graphics that GIF won't do justice to, or thumbnails in a photo gallery. But, to deliver high quality images (photos, wallpapers, or scientific imagery) it's a lousy choice, but the only one if you want your users to view the data in their browsers.
As for JPEG 2000, wavelet technology is already in use (such as LizardTech's MrSid software, which is not unimpressive). Certainly a fun and interesting idea, but it takes longer to decode and doesn't compress near as well as PNG (90k PDF). Considering how long it's taken PNG to gain acceptance (I'm still not convinced there's enough browser support to use pure PNG on my sites), I'm not holding my breath for JPEG 2000 as a web medium, and looking at the numbers, I'll take PNG over JPEG in a heartbeat.
JPG is great for pictures and such, but GIF compression offers lossless compression and is much more widely used for general images and icons.
The limitation for GIF of course is it's 256 color palette; however it is adaptive and on most web graphics or icons you won't use even the 256 color limit. However, because of the smaller palette, the images end up much smaller, and because of the lossless compression the images look just as intended.
JPG images can always be spotted; you can see the artifacts in almost any JPG compressed image. However, because the palette can be millions of colors, you get better color representation suitable for full color pictures.
I couldn't imagine a web site that didn't use compressed images these days. This article seems to assume that nobody knows about it or something =)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
GIFs have only 256 colors.
While you can offset this somewhat by using a selective pallette, most of the time it is still noticeable.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
If you were uploading the image for a website, you wouldn't be transferring the resource fork anyway, so it would make almost no difference.
You're an asshole.
for some people, loss of complexity is unacceptable. That's why we have C++.
j2000.org A BSD-licensed JPEG-2000 library developped under the European Union PRIAM project. Documentation is underway.
Instead of saving bandwidth by wondering how to use Paintshop Pro to compress your JPGs, you can save even more bandwidth by not posting stupid pleb articles.
By posting a stupid pleb article, and having a few thousand slashdot users wasting 5 minutes of their time each, that's like 50 days wasted when you add it all up.
For alot of graphics people, JPG is a bane and is only used when absolutely necessary as a result of this.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
is this a joke?? I thought this was NEWS FOR NERDS not NEWS FOR NOOBS !!!!
what kind of luser lurks behind the slashdot writers, there used to be relevant technical info here now there's mostly hype and pop fluff! jon katz refuses to tackle anything of substance, probably why he doesn't show his email address anymore
every time a browser asks for something from your webserver, it sends a list of formats it understands [w3.org], including picture formats.
I'm aware of HTTP/1.1's Accept: header, but what if the user agent indicates that it doesn't understand any of the transparent image formats, audio formats, or video formats that your web authoring tools can generate? Deny the user the page because the advertisers won't pay for the bandwidth to send it?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Format C:, the diskspace reaper!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
any webmaster that hasn't checked out the bandwidth conservation society should be slapped
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
I would ask your advertisers for fallback media:
- for audio/video go down to an image
- for an image with 8bit transparency go down to an image with 1bit transparency - gif...