We all love working with high-resolution images. Most of the free image banks on the web give us a festival of pixels, but when it comes to redistributing or adapting those photos, we need to make some adjustments. If you've ever wondered how to optimize images easily and with real-time preview, the process comes down to grabbing a copy of the freeware RIOT or downloading it as a plugin for graphics editors.
Personally, it's a problem I face quite often. Multiple companies want to promote their products on the web, but they hand out true postage stamps as 'official images.' This isn't so serious when viewing them on mobile devices. However, with the advance of 4K screens and higher standards for web quality, we can't always use them.
Fortunately, some press kits cut this conflict at the root with gigantic images, and the practice is increasingly widespread... but at the same time they install a new, perhaps more pleasant problem: their images are not optimized for the web.
If a photo is too large, it takes time to load. If it takes time to load, visitors get frustrated. You waste bandwidth, and bandwidth is expensive. What you need is to learn how to optimize images, and that's where RIOT comes in.
How to optimize images with RIOT
RIOT's interface is Spartan but very easy to use. When you open a high-resolution image, RIOT will show a performance warning for humbler computers, and its first recommendation is to resize.
It has a total of six built-in filters, the best of which is Lanczos3. Once the image resizing is done, you can change format, overall quality, encoding, and chroma subsampling or chrominance.
RIOT also lets you remove all metadata and apply basic adjustments like brightness and contrast. The final size appears on the right side, and with the zoom tool you can check how deep the quality loss is. The final advantage of RIOT is batch processing. If you want to optimize several images at once, you can do it without problems.
RIOT is freeware and can be downloaded as a standard installation or as a portable build. The alternative is to use it as a plugin in compatible graphics editors, including GIMP, IrfanView, or XnView.
In addition, a user took the trouble to convert it into a Paint.NET-compatible plugin. Its optimization quality is on par with different tools (it loses in some cases and wins in others), but its real-time preview makes RIOT a very convenient resource.
