There's no shortage of software to optimize GIFs and JPEGs, but manually checking the thousands of images in a large site is tedium with a capital T. To the rescue comes GIF Wizard, an intriguing service from Raspberry Hill Publishing; it can be found on the Web at www.gifwizard.com/ and will be released in a licensed server version for your LAN in July. GIF Wizard sifts through entire Web sites, single URLs, or even graphics on local or networked hard disks, and checks image files, duplicate images, and file links, returning detailed reports on potential size savings.
If GIF Wizard merely reported on crunching images it'd be interesting, yet hardly barnstorming. But wait! There's more. Toss GIF Wizard a URL and it returns with a report on savings and crunches GIFs and JPEGs on the fly, using one of seven different color-optimization schemes: GIF Best Fit, GIF Browser Safe, GIF Dithered, JPEG Standard, JPEG Progressive, JPEG High-Res, and JPEG High-Res Progressive. Within each main scheme GIF Wizard applies varying levels of optimization, in all cases slapping the results in your browser for onscreen eyeballing. The program can also resize image banners to fit 35 formats.
When GIF Wizard serves up any compressed images you'd like to use as replacements for existing graphics, just save them to a local disk from within your browser. Compressed images bear the same names as the originals, along with a few characters at the end based on the optimization used.
After all's said and done, GIF Wizard is extremely useful for Web developers priding themselves on sites that download quickly and efficiently. But it ain't free. GIF Wizard uses a tiered pricing structure, starting with purchases of "tokens" for light use all the way up to annual license fees for single sites, multiple sites based on ports, and Class C and Class B IP ranges.
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