Serving bloated, unoptimized images on your websites will have a very negative effect on your site speed and will lead to inevitable drops in conversions rates and customer satisfaction. Also, Google has indicated site speed is one of the important signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. Slower loading times will negatively affect your search ranking.

Image optimization is the art and science of minimizing image file size without affecting its visual quality. Our proprietary Smart Lossy Optimization algorithms excel at determining the perfect balance of image quality and file size, achieving on average 60% of savings without any perceptible impact on the image quality.

With Smart Lossy Optimization, you can also set a custom compression preset depending on your use-case. You may also bypass our smart image optimization pipeline and set a custom image quality level by yourself.

SupaRes API supports JPEG, PNG, Animated PNG, WebP, GIF, Animated GIF and SVG as input formats for image optimization pipeline.

Default Image Optimization Mode

It's worth noting that all images will be automatically optimized with Smart Lossy mode (unless you specify a lossless mode) and no additional user action is required to have your visuals prepared for the Web. In other words, SupaRes API will always yield perfectly optimized output images.

Smart Lossy Image Optimization

This is the default mode applied to all processed images. Images in JPEG, PNG, GIF, Animated GIF and SVG formats will be treated with Smart Lossy Optimization giving you confidence that your visuals will always have an unmatched quality with the smallest possible file size. Quality loss when using Smart Lossy Optimization is not noticeable to the human eye.

An example cURL request incorporating Image Upload method used only to optimize your images would look like so:

curl https://api.supares.com/1.0/upload \
     --user your-api-key: \
     --form file=@/path/to/image/file.jpg

Or with Image Fetch method:

curl https://api.supares.com/1.0/fetch \
     --user your-api-key: \
     --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{
         "url": "https://www.website.com/image.jpg"
     }'

Image Optimization Presets

In addition to the default smart lossy optimization mode which will yield images of excellent quality, the SupaRes API offers you five compression presets for different use-cases you may have. Those presets differ in terms of image quality and therefore the resulting file size; they describe the level of compression used to encode the output image.

{
    "optimize": {
        "compression": "high"
    }
}

An example cURL request of using Image Fetch method with lossy optimization preset will look like the following:

curl https://api.supares.com/1.0/fetch \
     --user your-api-key: \
     --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{
         "url": "https://www.website.com/image.jpg",
         "optimize": {
             "compression": "high"
         }
     }'

Custom Image Quality

If you would like to exercise more control over the compression process, you may optionally specify an explicit quality (Q) value. To set the Q value, specify "quality": N within the optimize hash where N is an integer within the range 1 - 100 (1 being the lowest with maximum compression and 100 with the best image quality).

{
    "optimize": {
        "quality": 75
    }
}

An example cURL request of using custom image quality will look like the following:

curl https://api.supares.com/1.0/fetch
     --user your-api-key: \
     --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{
         "url": "https://www.website.com/image.jpg",
         "optimize": {
             "quality": 75
         }
     }'