Smush.it presentations
Smush.it is getting more and more buzz all over the internets. Now there's even a song about it! Me and Nicole are pretty busy answering email, but a little slow to document the thing, I though I should at least shed some light on how the tool works by using some of the presentations.
What the tool does can be summarized in these steps:
- Turn GIFs into PNG8. Results are reported only if there's a saving, the file name then becomes
source.gif.png. Smush.it uses imagemagick to do the conversion and then pngcrush to crush the pngs - Crush PNGs using pngcrush
- Strip JPEG metadata and make them progressive, using jpegtran
- GIF animations: use gifsicle to remove pixels that don't change from one frame to another
This has been documented here on developer.yahoo.com together with the command line tools and options.
So all the tool does is run the appropriate command for each file type. Easy as that 
All the tools mentioned are free open-source and available on all operating systems, including Windows.
Here are some presentations on slideshare that might explain things a little more:
- High-perf web sites - PHP Quebec Montreal, March 2008
- 7 mistakes in image optimization - O'Reilly's Velocity, SFO, June 2008
- Ajax Experience, Boston, earlier this week. Draft 1, Draft 2. The final and shortest version is below. It doesn't say much but the talk was just 5 minutes and included a demo. It's weird how little you can say in 5 minutes, I mean just "hello, my name, ... welcome to blah, blah..." is 20 seconds
Happy smushing!
"Smush it! Smush it real good..." - hothardware.com
October 6th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Smush it will also convert GIFs to PNGs for better optimization. It’s simply great and easy and has made my life much easier. Thanks to Yahoo team.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:02 am
You might want to read John Harrington’s “Photo Business Blog” entry about this tool. He makes a good point that providing it, and using it, are very possibly in violation of the DMCA. Furthermore, giving people the ability to remove copyright information with a click, legal or not, is not very IP friendly. Perhaps you could tell it to skip the IPTC fields that contain copyright information?
October 7th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your comment!
I’m happy to announce that smush.it now retains all the meta data, including copyright information.
since the proper solution - stripping needless meta while keeping copyright info will be a little involved, as a temporary solution we’re keeping all the meta. The saving are no longer that impressive, but we’re be working on the right solution that helps performance and doesn’t harm artists.
Best,
Stoyan
October 8th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
@MarcW
Frankly I think there’s something faulty about that piece of legislation… like much of the concept of the DRM. But it’s a good thing it was pointed out I guess.
I do find Harrington’s tone to be inflammatory and acrimonious and it does very little to sensitise anyone to his issues either like much of the discourses that come from rights management entities… they don’t want your cooperation, just your compliance; cooperation would require a dialogue putting in evidence in how many ways their policies create problems for which they don’t want to find solutions. The direct Yahoo targeting (with the mention of their stock symbol) and the lawsuit allusions are a little overboard for me.
Either way… I always knew there was metadata in images, I just never realised how much of it there was from my own images which I create myself with tools like photoshop! The metadata removal capability of your tool, for however how long it was available, shredded away a lot of the things I took for granted, one of them being that metadata weight was insignificant.
I’d love to see some stats on how much bandwidth a day is used just for image metadata on the web, and then a breakdown of that usage (and how much of it is waste).
October 9th, 2008 at 9:51 am
[...] 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 [...]
October 11th, 2008 at 7:52 am
your tool not working
October 11th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Thanks Hansel for letting me know.
The tool hit the limit of 32000 subdirectories that you can have in a directory, it creates a new subdir for every smush.it “session” meaning every page you smush or all the files you upload or paste URLs without refreshing the smush.it page.
Anyway, I created a new dir to store the results, so it’s back to normal.
Thanks again for letting me know!
October 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Stoyan: I hope that you delete subdirectories after some time?
October 11th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Boštjan - currently not, waiting on me to write a script of some sort to get some stats and then a cron job to delete all files older than, say 1 hour. But for now, don’t upload anything private, just in case. Sorry about that, in the rush to get this tool functional, I didn’t have time for the proper housekeeping stuff. Will do asap.
November 21st, 2008 at 4:16 am
Great tool (looking forward to the ’strip all Meta’ option), but I have a bug, maybe…
If I enter a URL with a few ? parameters in the upload box it gets smushed, if I try and send one via the api it only seems to show the first parameter in the ’src’.
eg:
http://smush.it/ws.php?img=http://maps.google.com/staticmap?zoom=14&size=300×180&format=png8&markers=-35.282989,174.090151,blue&key=ABQIAAAAAGNZ8K1XCXT4L2hBGT3v0RQYK8a9jbuifQNkRTaHnDgUOS560BQ8c753CjzFvP0H0OJGT18WHlPDqQ&sensor=false
November 25th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Stoyan, am I right in thinking the only way of making cross-browser semi-transparent png8s is with fireworks? If so, that would be an excellent addition to your tool