Compress Images

Reduce image size

If you just need a photo to be smaller, drop it in and press Compress. The default setting handles almost everything. You can also paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard.

That default is called Balanced, and it saves at quality 75. A photo straight off a phone is usually three or four megabytes; at this setting it comes out somewhere between 500 and 900 KB. The sample photo on this page is 118 KB and comes out at 19 KB. Once it has finished, drag the handle across the preview to compare. Your original is on the left and the compressed version on the right, and you will have a hard time finding the difference.

If you want to go smaller, choose Aggressive or drag the Fine-tune slider down. Somewhere below 50 the compression starts to show: skies go blotchy and sharp edges pick up a faint halo. And if you would rather not change the picture at all, Strip metadata leaves every pixel as it is and only removes the hidden camera data, which by itself is often 20 to 60 KB.

Reduce image size in KB: 20 KB, 50 KB, 100 KB, or any limit

Upload forms tend to have limits. A signature or passport photo must be under 20 KB, a document scan under 100 KB. Rather than guessing with a quality slider, tell the tool the number.

1. Under Compression, switch from By quality to To a file size.
2. Choose one of the preset limits (20, 50, 100 or 200 KB) or type the exact figure into the box.
3. Drop in your photo, or several, and press Compress. Each one is fitted under the limit on its own.

The reason this needs its own mode is that quality is not the same thing as size. Two photos saved at quality 75 can differ in file size by a factor of ten, because a flat studio portrait has far less detail to store than a photo of a tree in leaf. So the tool tries several quality levels on each image and keeps the highest one that fits under your limit. If even the lowest quality is still too big, it reduces the dimensions slightly and tries again, since a somewhat smaller sharp photo is better than a full-size one that has dissolved into blocks. In the rare case where nothing fits, you get the closest it could manage and the thumbnail says so, rather than a silently oversized file.

People often call this resizing, and a form that says "resize the photo to 20 KB" means exactly this. Resizing proper changes the pixel dimensions; this changes how many bytes the pixels take to store, and the picture stays the same size on screen. Whatever limit you set is reflected in the address bar, so you can bookmark a link that opens the tool already configured, or send it to someone who has to meet the same limit.

Compress a PNG without losing quality

PNG is a lossless format, which means there is no quality to trade away. When you select a PNG the quality controls disappear and the panel says Lossless instead. What happens behind that word is that the file is repacked by OxiPNG, which looks for a more efficient way to store exactly the same pixels. Screenshots and graphics with flat areas of colour typically shrink by 10 to 40 percent, and nothing about the image changes.

The same property means a PNG cannot be forced to an exact file size, because there is no dial to turn. If you set a size limit while a PNG is loaded, the tool switches that file's output to WebP, which can meet the limit. If the file has to stay a PNG and also has to be under a certain size, the only option left is to make it smaller in pixels: resize it first, then compress the result.

Compress JPG, WebP, AVIF and iPhone HEIC photos

The compressor accepts all the common photo formats, including HEIC, which is what iPhones shoot in. By default it keeps each file in the format it arrived in, so a JPEG comes back as a JPEG and a PNG as a PNG. HEIC is the one exception: almost nothing outside Apple's own software can open it, so it comes back as a JPEG. If you want everything in one particular format, choose it under Output format.

If the images are for a website you run, WebP is the one to pick. Changing the format saves more than any amount of quality tuning, and every current browser displays WebP.

Compress many photos at once

You can drop a whole folder at once, or keep adding photos with the + tile in the strip. Whatever settings you choose apply to all of them, and the button changes to say how many it will process, for example Compress all 12. The images are worked on several at a time, so thirty phone photos take well under a minute on an ordinary laptop. When they are done, one download gives you a single ZIP.

If you change a setting after a run, the results are cleared and the Compress button comes back. That is deliberate: it means you can never download a batch where some images were made with the old setting and some with the new one.

Compressing is often only half the job. Once the results are ready, the Next step tiles under the Download button send them straight into Resize, Convert or Watermark without downloading and uploading again.

Nothing is uploaded

Everything on this page happens inside your browser. The compression engines are the same ones used by Google's Squoosh, compiled to run on your own computer, so your photos never leave your device. That is why there is no file size cap and no upload progress bar, and why the page keeps working if your connection drops. It also means the location your phone quietly records in every photo is never sent anywhere, and by default it is removed from the compressed copy as well.

Frequently asked questions