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The moral of that story is: The bigger the image the more bandwidth it consumes.
If you are hosting a popular photo gallery site, or you are an ISP with clients who have a lot of images on their sites, than it is entirely possible that most of your bandwidth is being eaten up by images!
Every good problem deserves a solution
There is a solution, however, and it's a relatively simple and easy solution at that. It's called image compression. What sounds like some sort of geek-speak is really just a simple procedure that squeezes the extra bloat out of web-hosted images without noticeably affecting their visual quality.
When an image gets compressed it naturally reduces the overall file size, and it's that file size which causes images to eat up so much bandwidth.
NOT compressing your images is a lot like leaving the water running in the sink while you brush your teeth. You're just pouring money down the drain.
The Trick to Simple, Image Compression
The key to saving wasted bandwidth and accelerating the image download process is to use automated image compression scripts that you simply install on your web server and forget about. The good ones will calculate image compression ratios on the fly and always deliver the smallest possible file size without sacrificing quality, and it will do it all by itself!
The end result is a bandwidth savings that can run as high as 50% or more on image-intensive sites. And THAT is a solution worth installing.
So whether you are an ISP who is looking to reduce the amount of bandwidth that your clients consume, or you are a webmaster who is paying way too much in bandwidth fees, the solution to expanding your wallet just could very well be compressing your images.
About the Author
Roderick Coleman is the developer of the powerful HTML/Image compressor available at http://www.optimizehosting.com . It 's a money-saving utility that ISPs can used to increase sales by giving the service to their clients, and webmasters can use to increase their site's performance, while reducing bandwidth usage.
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My comments to this article:
I notice everyday more and more so many have little or no idea on what image compression is. Some tutorials carry images over 1MB, well add 2 & 2 together a few 1000 view them and there goes your monthly bandwith all gone.
Display your tuts in the lowest compression you can, if they are good your going to get a lot of people viewing them. And in reality you do not need a 500kb image showing someone in photoshop where the filters are
Use save for web and compress. Some great tuts how to do this:
http://thedesigndump.com/tutorials2.htm
http://support.adobe.com/devsup/devsup.nsf/docs/52521.htm
http://nmc.loyola.edu/intro/design/webready.htm
Regards
Donna
. aside from the reasons of greed there is also a certain amout of payback from not using elephant sized images, and thats the internet will run faster and the saving in bandwidth for ALL will be huge.
