Image Compressor

What Actually Happens When You Compress an Image

Each photo you take carries huge data than your eyes actually need. A compressor goes through that data and strips out the parts that won't be missed, subtle color shifts, repeated pixel patterns, that kind of thing and packs what's left into a much smaller file. Done well, you can cut a file down by half or more and nobody looking at it would ever guess.

Why Bother Compressing at All

Google does this too, and they take into account load time when rating your website. Reducing images isn't really a luxury, it's one of the simplest things you can do to make a website feel quicker without changing a single line of code.

It also simply makes everyday life easier. Smaller files upload faster, fit inside email attachment limits without a fight, and don't eat through your storage the way a folder of untouched camera photos will. And because a good compressor is careful about what it removes, you get all of this without the image actually looking any different.

How to Use It

Drop your images in, or click to select them from your device. Adjust the compression slider if you want more or less aggressively shrinking the default setting works well for most images. Press Compress, check each result, then download files one by one. That's the entire process and nothing is happening on a server anywhere, it's happening locally within your browser.

Picking the Right Format

This trips people up more than it should. When compressing a photo, such as one with a lot of colors, gradients or fine detail, use JPG or WEBP. PNG is the better choice if you require a transparent background, or you're working with a logo, icon or a screenshot with lots of flat colors and sharp text, because PNG compression eliminates blurring of sharp edges which is possible with JPG compression. If you need to change your image format first, use our WEBP Converter to convert images into WEBP before compressing. If your image started life as a BMP or TIFF, you're sitting on a lot of dead weight, converting and compressing those usually shrinks them dramatically.

How Much Smaller Will It Get?

It depends on the image, but most photos come down 40 to 90% with no visible difference. Simple graphics, flat colors, screenshots, that sort of thing often compress even further than that. If you're picking a quality setting yourself rather than using the default: product shots and detailed images do well around 75-85%, photos with people in them are safer around 70-80% since we're all pretty sensitive to skin tones looking off, and background or decorative images can usually take a more aggressive 60-70% without anyone noticing.

Where This Actually Comes in Handy

For website images, you can also use our Background Remover to create cleaner product images before optimizing their file size. But it's everywhere: loading product photos quickly on an online store, keeping social media images below a platform's size limit, getting images to fit within a cloud storage plan, or simply keeping a massive photo library from consuming your cloud storage plan.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

If you're going to resize an image, do that before you compress it. There's no point compressing a 4000-pixel-wide photo down to a smaller file size if it's only ever going to be displayed at 800 pixels wide. You're better off resizing first and compressing what's left. It's also worth avoiding compressing the same file over and over; each pass loses a little more, and that adds up. And naturally, you can't get back details that aren't there anymore, so always start from the best-quality original you have rather than a copy that's already been compressed once.