Batch Optimization with IrfanView

Yesterday I talked about load time and optimizing website images with IrfanView and you might of felt overwhelmed at the process of doing this for each and every image in your website. Fear not as there is a quick way to do this for many images at once.

Open your handy dandy IrfanView tool and under the File menu select Batch Conversion/Rename. In the dropdown labelled Look In choose the directory where your images are located. This should bring up a list of all of the images in that directory. Now highlight the images to optimize (use Shift and/or CTRL to select multiple images) and then hit the Add button on the left hand side. This will add all of your selected images into the box at the left. In the Output Directory box enter the path where you want your new optimized images to go.

For jpeg images click on the options button and then pick the quality. For gif images click on the advanced options button then enable change color depth and enter the number of colors. Note that you will need to do the jpegs and the gifs separately as all of the images you optimize at the same time will come out as the same image type.

Hit the Start button at the top left to get started with your optimization. Your images should now be optimized and they can be uploaded to your site.