Wiki Life: Image compression in the TechNet Wiki

Welcome Wiki Ninjas to another Wiki Life article.

This is my first post for the Wiki Ninjas blog and I am happy to be a contributor here!

I wanted to use my first blog post to share a tip with you about submitting images to the TechNet Wiki. The majority of us append multiple photos to our wiki articles. Each photo takes some time to upload which prolongs our submission. As well, large articles with lots of images can also take time to render when requested from the server by the reader. These slow page loads can annoy a reader and influence them to click away from a post prematurely. Especially if they are browsing from a mobile device and bandwidth limits are a concern.

Image Format

One way to avoid both of these scenarios is to choose the correct image format and then compress your illustrations before sending them to MSDN.

Generally, the two main formats for screenshots are .JPG and .PNG. Each has its place on the web and this is mainly due to the amount of data each file type holds. JPGs (JPEG) generally contain a lot of data but it can lose this information when images are compressed. This means that compressed JPGs are great for smaller photos you need to send by email or view on smaller devices.

PNGs are referred to as “lossless”, meaning the format does not compromise image quality when compressed. PNGs tend to be rather large when saved though. However, there are products that can help you shrink the file size by sometimes up to half the original without losing image quality.

Image Compression

There are several tools that can help you compress PNGs. The one I am partial to is PNGGauntlet. (See below. And yes, I optimized the photo.) It is a free download that works on Windows 10 and below. PNGGauntlet queries PNGOUT, OptiPNG, and DeflOpt and then chooses the best to compress your files.

PNGGauntlet

For Mac users, there is ImageOptim and for those on Linux, you can use Trimage to optimize both JPGs and PNGs.

If you do not want to use a standalone tool, you can also find PNG compression on multiple websites like TinyPNG and Compress PNG. Keep in mind though that if you are watching your internet bandwidth that you will incur a hit on both the upload and download of your images from these sites.

Summary

Give image compression a try with your next TechNet Wiki article. You will increase your image upload speed and article rendering speed. Both you and the intended reader will be happy you did.

by Ken Cenerelli (Twitter,  Blog,  Profile)