Reduce sprite size by packing images

[Jeroen8]

When I use the current css sprite generator on my personal website http://www.olino.org/us/ for generating a sprite for all the images used in the current CSS the resulting sprite is twice the size of the combined size of the separate images themselfs.

The sprite size can be reduced considerably by packing the images using a smart algorithm. An exampe and pseudo code for this can be found on: http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/lightmaps/default.html

This algorithm is also used for a wordpress plugin which produces highly efficient sprites (sizes):
http://www.mummey.org/csprites/

[Ed Eliot (ejeliot)]

There's an option to compress PNGs on output (Optipng). If you're using PNGs did you try selecting that option? It should dramatically reduce file sizes. I could also look into adding similar compression tools for GIFs and JPEGs.

[Stuart Colville (muffinresearch)]

When you refer to size I assume you mean file size? Can you provide an example highlighting the case for needing to pack images in a different way?