SpriteMe seems to only sprites images that are already used in a background. It would be more useful it had the option of spriting all images on a page and then gave you the HTML/CSS code to display each sprite.

I'm at "The Ajax Experience" and saw Steve demo this page. I already have 3-4 pages in my application that I think I can update to use what I got from this site. It's a very nice tool. The only issue is that sometimes the file size of the generated image is larger. I guess they're just using the default settings for pngcrush but I'm not sure how much tweaking the image would help some of my results but it might.

Depending, it might still be worthwhile to use the bigger image vs. the overhead of an extra request. At least until you can shrink it down further anyway.

Unless you're talking about very large image sizes ( >200k ) and very low bandwidth; latency is a bigger timesuck, even with pipelined requests.

Not to say that you shouldn't minimize images, but that's less of a concern than minimizing the number of requests.

Thanks, I had been putting that off for a long, long time, but that tool provided enough of an impetus to do it. Shaved 6 requests off my front page. Some day when I get a moment I'll do another one for all the buttons.

There's http://dabuttonfactory.com for that.

Wow. That's very cool.

http://spritegen.website-performance.org/ is similar. It has you upload a zip of your images and I think it gives you a bit more control over the sprited image it creates.