JISC Digital Media Blog

Smush it up

Posted by Antony Theobald on Thursday 09 October 2008 at 4:51pm
Tags: copyright | image editing | metadata | software

The developers of a potentially useful new online tool for optimising images have hastily withdrawn one of the main ‘image crushing’ features it launched with.

The developers of a potentially useful new online tool for optimising images have hastily withdrawn one of the main ‘image crushing’ features it launched with.

Smush.it allows users to upload images, enter image URLs or use a Firefox extension to act on any online image. The tool quickly recompresses and/or reformats images “without changing their look or visual quality” and claims it can significantly reduce the size of bloated web pages.

The tool uses a number of existing open source algorithms to create the smaller file sizes. When Yahoo Developer Network announced it last week, one of the main features was that it could automatically strip metadata from JPEG files. This feature has now been temporarily withdrawn in light of some concern over the ease with which copyright information could be removed from an image’s IPTC fields.

Thankfully the developers, Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, are working on new ways to minimise file sizes without removing copyright information. Some would argue that none of the metadata should be removed.