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Basic Image Optimisation with RIOT

This tutorial is primarily aimed at web site customers of mine who are uploading images to their own websites.

The speed of your website can be affected by the quantity of images to be displayed, as well as their physical size and the size taken up on disk.

Web designers often optimise your initial images for you to ensure speedier loading.

I’ll even show you how to do it – simply watch the video adjacent which is also on my YouTube channel with other videos. Enjoy. Mark

Tutorial Video

 

Take a look at this folder of files, you can see that the majority are well over 3000Kb, and their physical dimensions 4608 x 3456 pixels – way bigger than screen dimensions.

We can reduce the physical dimensions down to 10% which will still give us a decent viewing size.
Further, we can also reduce the amount of perceived colours – an image from a camera contains millions of colours which the human eye does not perceive. We simply replace those with ones that we can see – we don’t see any different and the file size comes down.

Using RIOT to batch optimise

Web designers use specialised software for this but for basic optimisation you could use a free tool like RIOT. Download it and install it.

Once you’ve done this, have a folder of images ready and take the following steps to optimise your folder of images.

  1. Create a folder within that folder, call it ‘opt‘.
  2. Run the program, and then select the Batch option from the icons.
  3. Then use Add Images (all images from folder) to add your original images.
  4. Now select Additional tasks, and add Resize, select % and 10.
  5. Add compress to size, and enter 100.
  6. Now use the three dots to select your output folder, this should be the ‘opt’ folder you created.
  7. Then click start.

When it has completed, check the files sizes and dimensions in your ‘opt’ folder – these are now the images you should use in your site.

If all this just seems a little too laborious or complicated then don’t forget if you provide us with the images we can optimise them for you. Our usual rates apply.

Please feel free to share the link to this video and comment on this article.

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