Does anyone know of any software that can compress or improve the speed at which images (eg. photos)on a website can be downloaded. As you know, the speed at which your site downloads is very important.
I usually run images thru myImager.com I've been able to reduce the size of some files by well over 65%. One thing is, if the file is a static gif then consider making it into a jpg format. They are much smaller in size and load faster.
This is and image reducer I've used. You can either reduce your images with it online for free, or buy a desktop version. http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html
I was having the same problems with my site images. The way I solved the problem was installing Photoshop6 and optimizing the image in their Image Ready software (it works with photo pictures too). I compressed a 365kb jpeg image to 41.9kb, a 16kb gif to 5 kb..and so on. All you need is an image optimizer, I would stay away from Fireworks (dreamweavers version of photoshop) because you can only save your images as a png file and this type of image is new and a lot of browsers aren't equipped to handle a png file. However, Photoshop lets you save your images as gifs and jpegs which are web friendly files. Hope this helped. Good luck!