Yahoo! recently launched a tool for designers web developers called Smush it! which allows them to compress and optimize the size of any image, on the fly, without losing quality.

The online tool is very useful to compress large images and can be used by bloggers to optimize images for their posts which in turn saves a lot of bandwidth and site-loading time.

Using the tool is as easy as browse and upload and no sort of configuration is required. As soon as the image is uploaded and smushed, a zip file containing the compressed images is given to the user to download.

Smush it! even displays the compression percentage once the image has been processed which gives a good understanding of how much the image has been optimized compared to its original. Good thing is, Smush it! even has a Firefox extension which makes optimizing images even more easy.