During my recent NACIS trip to Sacramento, California, I had the privilege of going out to lunch with a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad student named Daniel P. Huffman, along with three other individuals, to discuss the Ortellius software demonstration presented at the conference.
Daniel seemed like a very nice person, so I thought I would take a look at a lot of the work he has produced and uploaded on to his web site, somethingaboutmaps.com. Both from a mapping standpoint and related to image optimization. My brief evaluation related to image optimization work can be viewed below:
Unoptimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 104 KB
Optimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 9.65 KB
Unoptimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 98.2 KB
Optimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 9.24 KB
Unoptimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 144 KB
Optimized 175×175 pixel .jpg graphic – 15.7 KB
Unoptimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 151 KB
Optimized 175×175 pixel .png graphic – 19.3 KB
Unoptimized 960×129 pixel .png graphic – 14.5 KB
Optimized 960×129 pixel .png graphic – 4.94 KB
All five of those .png images were pretty easy to process. One of the images used 24-bit color, so I converted it to .jpg format and then zonally compressed portions of it using xat.com’s Image Optimizer. I processed the remaining four images in the same tool for a bit of initial optimization work, then pulled additional file size out of each image using PNGSlim. All told, 512 KB of imagery was able to be reduced to 58.8 KB in cumulative size, an improvement of 89 percent.
Best of luck to you, Daniel, as you work to complete your graduate studies and move forward in your career! Just remember to try and keep the electronic imagery you create in-check if you can…so that people from different connection speeds, on different tools, from different regions of the world, can all access your content in a timely manner.
