Compress Image
Compress your images to reduce file size while maintaining quality. Perfect for optimizing images for web use, email attachments, or saving storage space.
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What image compression actually does
Digital images are grids of pixels, and stored raw they are enormous — a 12-megapixel photo is roughly 36 MB before any compression. Every format you use is a compression scheme. JPEG is lossy: it converts the image into frequency components and discards the fine detail human vision is least sensitive to, which is why a quality setting of 80 can cut a file by 90 per cent with no visible difference. PNG is lossless: it never discards data, which makes it right for screenshots and logos and wrong for photographs.
WebP and AVIF are newer formats that beat both, typically producing files 25 to 50 per cent smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality, and both are supported by every current browser. Beyond format choice, the biggest saving is usually resolution: a 4000-pixel-wide photo displayed in a 800-pixel column is carrying five times the data anyone will see.
Why we built this tool
Images are the heaviest part of most web pages, and page weight decides how a site performs on a mid-range phone. Elsewhere the constraint is a hard limit: an upload form capped at 2 MB, an email attachment, or a marketplace that rejects large photos.
Photographs are personal — family pictures, ID scans, product shots before launch. Uploading them to a compression service means handing over the full-resolution original, complete with whatever location data the camera embedded. Our compressor decodes and re-encodes the image on a canvas inside your browser, so the file never leaves your device. There is no size cap, no queue, no account, and no watermark on the output.
Tips and common mistakes
- Resize before compressing — reducing pixel dimensions saves far more than lowering quality on an oversized image.
- Quality 80 is the usual sweet spot for photographs; below 60 the artefacts become visible in flat areas and skies.
- Screenshots and logos belong in PNG or WebP; JPEG smears sharp text and thin lines.
- Keep your originals — compression is one-way, and you cannot recover discarded detail later.
Quick start: using Compress Image
- Add the image or images you want to shrink.
- Choose the output format — JPEG or WebP for photos, PNG only when you need transparency.
- Set the quality; around 80 per cent is the usual sweet spot for photographs.
- Reduce the pixel dimensions too if the image is larger than it will ever be displayed.
- Compare the preview against the original at full zoom, then download.
Resize first with Resize Image for the biggest saving, and use Convert Image Format to move to WebP.