This study presents design and optimization of compact and efficient nanooptical couplers involving photonic crystals. Nanooptical couplers that have single and double input ports are designed to obtain efficient transmission of electromagnetic waves in desired directions. In addition, these nanooptical couplers are cascaded by adding one after another to realize electromagnetic transmission systems. In the design and optimization of all these nanooptical couplers, the multilevel fast multipole algorithm, which is an efficient full-wave solution method, is used to perform electromagnetic analyses and simulations. A heuristic optimization method based on genetic algorithms is employed to obtain effective designs that provide the highest efficiency values. Two types of optimization strategies are applied using nanorods with a fixed length and using nanorods with varying lengths. This way, photonic crystals consisting of irregular arrays of both identical and nonidentical dielectric elements are designed for the realization of nanooptical couplers. The designs and their numerical results show that it is possible to design and further improve efficient nanooptical couplers with simple and compact geometries based on the principles of photonic crystals. Using relatively simple geometries and a single material, the designed nanooptical couplers are more preferable than the available designs in the literature.