All the image files on your computer basically fall under two groups – raster images and vector images. Raster images are composed of small particles called pixels while the vector images are made up of paths of any shape like straight, curved, circular etc. Because of their different designs these files must be created and edited using different programs. Some examples of raster image formats are BMP, JPEG, GIF etc., while the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format is very popular for vector images. SVG images are XML based vector images and contain all the vector path information in form of the XML file. Many modern web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox support the SVG vector images to some degree.
If you are working with SVG files and want to share them online, then your first priority should be to reduce the size of these files. Smaller SVG files not only take smaller duration of time during the transfer over the internet, but they also render faster when you access them in your web browser.
If you want to reduce the SVG files, then the open source SVGO tool can turn out to be very useful. This tool can both reduce the file size of the SVG vector images by as much as 80% and optimize them for faster rendering.
Using the SVGO tool is very easy. Just launch the SVGO gui binary and then drag-n-drop your SVG files on its window. All the files are automatically compressed and optimized. You are only shown the former file size, the current file size and the percentage of file size reduced. Most of the times the percent reduction in the file size is in the orders of 20% but in a few cases the files actually grows bigger in size.
Conclusion: SVGO is a simple open source tool that can reduce the size of SVG vector images. It can cut down the file size of SVG images and can also optimize them for rendering better in various web browsers.
You can download the SVGO tool from https://github.com/svg/svgo-gui.