Smush comic images to save disk space and reduce page load time

[jodal]

The size of comic images can be reduced without loosing any quality by pushing them through lossless optimization, like e.g. Yahoo's www.smushit.com can do for you. Smushing comics would save a lot of disk space and reduce page load time.

Some work have already been done by @adamcik on a tool for smushing the images in comics' archive. See the file bin/smush in the repo for details.

[adamcik]

See https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/payload#CompressImages and http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#opt_images for tips. You might also be able to convert PNG24 to PNG8 in some cases saving a lot of size. I was also thinking about trimming whitespace, but that feels like a bad idea.

For insanely large images splitting images might also be a good idea, but one would need to do something like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2933084/is-cropping-of-jpeg-images-using-the-pil-lossless if you want it to be a lossless operation.

Or just 'jpegtran -crop WxH+X+Y -copy none -optimize -perfect -outfile output.jpg input.jpg' which I tested on one such image, in that case there was no reduction in size, but at least it can be downloaded in parallel.