: Software to combine multiple images Combining multiple images into a single image is a good way to improve performance by reducing the number of http requests. But how do most webmasters manage

@Moriarity557

spritegen.website-performance.org/ http://csssprites.com/ csssprites.org/

You don't want to load all your images from sprites.
It can slow your site down if the page that is loaded doesn't actually use the images.
There is a clear balance of what needs to be on sprites and what doesn't.

What I recommend is:


Make sprites for images that appear on most pages.
Use a lazyload script to load other images when they are in focus.

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@Yeniel560

ImageMagick is a great image processing tool that can do this. It's command line only so isn't the easiest to use for non-programmers. For stitching images together, use the montage command:

montage -geometry +4+4 *.png


This won't generate the CSS for you, but unless you have more than 30 images that shouldn't be a problem.

There are many online tools that can do the CSS too, with class names based on the filenames. This one is very good.

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@Karen161

Well, I use a GIMP script for taking care of that.

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@Pope3001725

FYI, they're called sprites and there's quite a few free ones available online.

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