Can someone suggest a good wordpress plugin for compressing images?

[skehoe]

I am building a new website and it has 500+ photo images.

I've got less than 100 in there at the moment and the page speed is already very slow.

I'm trying to reduce the size of the images before uploading but without a photoshop application it is very difficult.

Are there any great plugins for wordpress that can help?

[Jinx14678]

I would add, to say between a memcache plugin and an .htaccess solution you are comparing apples to oranges....

Total Cache utilizes memory to cache (so even the cache can be slowed by the system) But with Supercache it is a static copy served using .htaccess

So saying one is better than the other in a blanket response is kind of dead wrong --- They both do different things in different ways for different reasons/end solutions.

Also, I had never used Smush, but it increased my load time and dropped my score with both Google and Pingdom, but I could have done something wrong

[Esaky]

Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress.
Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

A better plugin for caching is W3 Total Cache. You should use that plugin instead of WP Super Cache.

Use CDN ! 
Use Photoshop to resize and quality for Web is 60% !

[KeriMorgret]

I have a couple of suggestions. If you're on a PC, download Irfanview. It's free and allows you to resize images before you upload them. If you're on a Mac, check out Gimp. There are a lot of free editors out there that can help.

For Wordpress, I like using the smushit plugin.

[Jinx14678]

Hi,

not familiar with a plugin that does just that for images, but http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/ creates a cache copy of the whole page and serves it gzipped.

There are some mods and customizations to be made, you can choose to use it in php or htacess mode.

Since WP is already php memory intensive, I would suggest using the .htaccess setup and making it compress.

But there are many options you can toy with to see if it improves loadtime

Alternatively http://www.picresize.com/ is a nice site that is free and allows you to compress to size/format easily, if this is an option for you.

Hope this helps