Production Planning, Continued

Until recently, optimizing images for a site was the most time-consuming task involved with building web sites. I spent most of my time working in applications such as Photoshop that were not designed to work with web graphics. Because of this, I needed to use two or three different applications to optimize images. Thankfully, the folks at Macromedia and Adobe understand the problem and have provided us with solutions.

Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe ImageReady are two new graphics applications that make the task of optimizing images for the web much more simple. While both of these programs have lots of useful features, I'm only going to discuss their batch optimization capabilities.

Batch Processing Images
Large sites can contain hundreds or even thousands of images. I don't know about you, but the idea of optimizing 1,000 images one by one is a scary thought. With the batch processing capabilities of Fireworks and ImageReady, you can optimize large groups of images in one step.

Before you can set up batch processing, you'll need to size all your images correctly and name them appropriately. Whatever name you give the source file will be the name that is used for the optimized file, with an appropriate extension attached. Next, you'll need to group all your images according to their optimization settings. For instance, let's say all the headers on your site should be optimized using an adaptive palette, 16 colors, and no dithering. All of these header images will go into one folder. For each different optimization setting, you'll create a new folder. Once you've done that, you're ready for the easy part.

Fireworks and ImageReady handle batch optimization differently, but the process is very simple in both. You just set the optimization options in either program and select the relevant image folder. In a matter of minutes, you can optimize every image on your site.

ImageReady
Adobe product designed for web graphics production. Includes batch processing and other web-specific features.

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