Meet Image Optimization, A New Smashing Book By Addy Osmani

• 11 min read
• Performance, Smashing Books
• Share on Twitter, LinkedIn

About The Author

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

Email Newsletter

Your (smashing) email

Weekly tips on front-end & UX.
Trusted by 200,000+ folks.

Images have been a key part of the web for decades. Our brains interpret images much faster than text, which is why high-quality visuals drive conversions and user engagement. Just think about landing pages and product photos, feature panels and hero areas. To be effective, all these images need to be carefully orchestrated to appear on the screen fast — but as it turns out, loading images efficiently at scale isn’t a project for a quiet afternoon.

Image optimization, loading behavior and rendering in the browser require understanding of image formats and image compression techniques, image decoding and browser rendering, image CDNs and adaptive media loading, not to mention effective caching and preloading. Let’s figure it all out.

For a thorough guide on image optimization, we’ve teamed up with Addy Osmani, an engineer manager working on Google Chrome and focusing around performance for decades. The result is a book with everything you need to optimize your images and display them swiftly, without being slowed down along the way.

• Jump to the details ↓
• Download a free PDF sample (12MB)
• Printed books will be shipped in early June.
• Get the book right away.

About The Book

Next to videos, images are the heaviest, most requested assets on the web. Some of the biggest size savings and performance improvements can come through a better image optimization strategy. So how do we encode, deploy, serve and maintain images over time? Our new book explores just that. Check free PDF preview (3MB).

Addy’s new book focuses on what matters: modern approaches to image compression and image delivery, practical tools and techniques to automate optimization, responsive images, current and emerging image formats, how browsers load, decode and render images, CDNs, lazy-loading, adaptive media loading and how to optimize for Core Web Vitals. Everything in one, single, 528-pages book.

Image Optimization will help you deliver high-quality responsive images in the best format and size, and at the moment when your users need them the most. Packed with useful tips and techniques, the book has a sharp focus on practical application and longevity of your image optimization strategies. Jump to table of contents ↓

You’ll learn:

• image formats,
• image compression,
• improve image rendering,
• prepare images for a variety of resolutions,
• automate image optimization,
• image maintenance,
• lazy-loading and techniques like SQIP,
• image CDNs, and how to set up one,
• AVIF, JPEG XL, and HEIF, their pros and cons,
• Core Web Vitals and how to optimize for them,
• adaptive image delivery for network conditions.

Table Of Contents

Images help us tell a story and better engage with our customers. There is no shortage of high-quality photos around us, but how to do we encode, deploy, serve and maintain them?

The 23 chapters of our shiny new book explore just that.

528 pages. The eBook is available right away (PDF, ePUB, Amazon Kindle). Shipping now. Written by Addy Osmani. Designed by Espen Brunborg and Nadia Snopek.

About the Author

Addy Osmani is an engineering manager working on Google Chrome. His team focuses on speed, helping keep the web fast. Devoted to the open-source community, Addy’s past open-source contributions include Lighthouse (an auditing tool for performance and web best practices), Workbox (libraries for offline-caching files using service workers), Yeoman (the web scaffolding tool), Critical (the critical-path CSS optimization tool), and TodoMVC. Addy is the author of the book Learning JavaScript Design Patterns.

Reviews and Testimonials

“An incredibly comprehensive overview of image optimization. This book will teach you everything you need to know about delivering effective and performant images on the web.”

— Katie Hempenius, Google

“Optimizing image delivery is key to building high-performance web apps. This book explains everything developers should know about choosing the right image format, compressing image assets — and more!”

— Mathias Bynens, Google

“Images are the heart and soul of the web; they help create that emotional connection with humans. Yet, it is really easy to ruin that experience through slow loading or worse, over quantizing the pixels and distorting images. Understanding how images work is essential for every engineer; the last thing we want is to deal with open bugs from bad creative or performance experiences.”

— Colin Bendell, Shopify

Technical Details

• ISBN: 978-3-945749-94-4 (print)
• Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
• Free worldwide airmail shipping from Germany.
• eBook is already available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
• Get the book right away.

Community Matters ❤️

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for the kind, ongoing support. The eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy. Just sayin'! ;-)

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

More Smashing Books & Goodies

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing.

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Paul and Adam are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?