Most of our clients don't know how to optimize their images for the web. And you could wonder whether they should really have to. The fact is that most images these days have large dimensions, due to the camera's they are shot with. And large images don't work well on the web. They lead to unnecessary download time, increased brandwidth and hosting cost, an enlarged digital footprint and worst off all: Google will punish you by lowering your website rank.

The plugin

To overcome this problem, I've written a fairly simple Joomla 1.5 plugin that does the image optimization for the user without him or her knowing about it. The user can resize the image in the Joomla editor of his or her choice and the plugin will then optimize the image and write the image to a cache directory. Because the original image is also stored and used as the source for resizing, the image can be resized whenever the user likes without loss of quality.

The plugin settings

The plugin settings are pretty simple. The only things you can tweak are the image types you want the plugin to optimize.

For now the only options are jpg, png and gif. By default the gif image types are excluded because the transparent gifs will not optimize nicely. If you know of a good fix for this, please share this with me so that the plugin can be further improved!

I've tried to use as much of the Joomla shizzle in it as possible. So it should work on most configurations, except PHP4 (witch in my opinion should never be used, with one or two exceptions). If you come across any bugs, please let me know.

Download

Download the image optimizer plugin for Joomla 1.5

Update: The plugin is also available for Joomla 1.6