CloudFlare announces Polish for automatic image optimization on user websites

CloudFlare has launched a new functionality on their platform. They call it Polish.

Polish is available to paying customers of CloudFlare and is targeted at websites with tons of high quality images.

CloudFlare Polish technology would automatically optimize images for faster delivery over the internet.

Two modes are available: Lossless and Lossy.

Lossless option removes meta information from all the images on the connected website. The idea is to remove the bloat in images without affecting their quality.

Lossy option would basically optimize the image to be more web friendly. This would change the quality of the image and is not suitable if your website is used to showcase your portfolio.

The company said:

Reducing image sizes has a particularly large impact on wireless devices that have limited bandwidth. If a large number of your visitors are accessing your site on a mobile device, Polish will be a big performance win.

CloudFlare would launch another new feature named Mirage tomorrow. Mirage is again targeted at image intensive websites but is largely aimed at making them responsive. This means that CloudFlare would deliver the images in format suitable for the device accessing the user website. Mobile devices would get resized images automatically for example.