David Artz's Blogs

I recently needed to optimize around 30 photos that I exported from iPhoto. These files are huge and not ready for the web, but saving all 30 manually seemed a task for the mundane.

I then remembered Droplets, a little known feature of Photoshop to convert any Action (save, resize, filter, etc.) into an icon that you can drag and drop files to, and have it perform that action automatically - a productivity booster indeed.

Learn how to create a Droplet in Photoshop by checking out my video tutorial and article here:

Bulk Image Compression with Photoshop Droplets
A word of caution, always check the results to ensure quality and filesize are in total harmony!

It's been a while (since Sprites?) since I've had something new in optimization land for designers.

I've read a couple enlightening articles recently on PNG8, and how if you use Fireworks, you get a full alpha transparency layer that degrades nicely in IE6 (transparent pixels disappear, opaque pixels stay) without the performance impact of the AlphaImageLoader filter.

Check this article out first: PNG8 - The Clear Winner

And then read my article practicing real-world scenarios and let me know what you think:

PNG Transparency Tools & Techniques - Optimizing PNGs!

If you're a Photoshop user, Fireworks PNG8 should be a new tool for creating low-bandwidth transparent masterpieces. If you're a Fireworks user, you may just be thinking Artz is a newbie. Let me know which one you are :)

Greetings shiftlings! I'm Dave Artz, leader of AOL's Website Optimization team, a group at AOL charged with helping the willing and able speed up their site and make it more accessible to devices and search engines. I created a screencast on a recently open sourced tool from AOL, Pagetest. This tool makes it easy to figure out why the designs you've worked so hard on might be slowing down once they're built, and ammunition to get back into shape.