If you’ve played around with optimizing your website for small screens, you know one of the big headaches is resizing images. You can set the viewport in your head tags to make sure your main content is the focus on mobile devices, but you can’t easily shrink images.

On many mobile devices, rendering the images is what slows down page load times. That’s where TinySrc comes in. It’s a clever service that parses your images and presents scaled-down versions to mobile devices.

Using tinySrc is pretty simple, all you need to do is prefix your image URLs with the tinySrc domain, something like:

http://i.tinysrc.mobi/http://foo.com/foo.png

TinySrc will then detect the device that’s visiting your site (tinySrc has partnered with Device Atlas so its device listings are extensive) and serve out an appropriately shrunken version of your image.

If you’d like complete control over the size of your images, you can specify parameters in the URL. For more details on all of tinySrc’s settings see the documentation.

While you are relying on a third party service — a choice which always carries the usual concerns about speed and reliability — tinySrc is definitely one of the fastest, easiest ways to shrink your images for the small screen.

[via Ajaxian]

See Also:

• New Frameworks Give Mobile-Web Apps a Boost
• Firefox Mobile Alpha Lands on Android
• Gmail Mobile Is Always on the Move
• Build an iPhone-Optimized Website with iUI