image optimization

When we saw Chris put up a list of cloud-hosted data-stores, we couldn't resist letting him know that we also had one of those, only ours is a fully featured CMS that come with a rich query language and an open source, real time, collaborative authoring tool that you can tailor to your specific needs using React. It's called Sanity.io.

“Add us to your list!” we asked Chris. “No, your stuff is interesting, can’t you write about you,” he replied. “Maybe something that would be useful for people working with images.” Challenge accepted!

Systems like Sanity wants to free your content from the specific page it happens to be sitting on, so that you can flow it through APIs. That way you can reuse your painstakingly crafted content anywhere you need it.

So, what does this mean for images?

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Popular image file formats such as JPG, PNG, and GIF have been around for a long time. They are relatively efficient and web developers have introduced many optimization solutions to further compress their size. However, the era of JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs may be coming to an end as newer, more efficient image file formats aim to take their place.

We're going to explore these newer file formats in this post along with an analysis of how they stack up against one another and the previous formats. We will also cover optimization techniques to improve the delivery of your images.

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I'm forever trying to make my local image workflow easier. I work with images as part of blog posts, images as part of sites I'm working on, images headed to social media... images everywhere. Almost always headed to the web. If we're taught one thing about images and the web, it's that they should be optimized.

For me, that means dragging every single image onto ImageOptim before using it. Monotonous repetitive tasks are fertile ground for computerization, so let's computerize it.

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