Compress Image

Large image files slow down websites, fill up phone storage, and get rejected by upload forms that cap the file size. Our free image compressor shrinks JPG, PNG and WebP photos to a fraction of their original size while keeping them sharp enough for the web, email, exam forms and social media.

Everything happens locally in your browser using the Canvas API, so even a folder full of high-resolution photos compresses in seconds without ever being uploaded. Drop one image or a whole batch, tune the quality, and download the results individually or as a single ZIP.

When you need to compress an image

Image compression is one of those small tasks that shows up everywhere. A photographer emailing a gallery, a student uploading a form photo, a shop owner adding product pictures to a website — all of them hit the same wall: the original file is simply too big. A modern phone camera easily produces 4–12 MB photos, and that size is wasteful for anything that will be viewed on a screen.

Common reasons people compress images include:

• Speeding up a website — smaller images are the single biggest win for page-load time and Core Web Vitals.
• Meeting an upload limit — exam portals, government forms and job applications often cap photos at 50 KB, 100 KB or 200 KB.
• Emailing or messaging — many inboxes reject attachments over a few megabytes, and WhatsApp re-compresses anything you send.
• Saving storage — shrinking a folder of holiday photos can free up gigabytes without deleting a single picture.

JPG, PNG or WebP — which should you compress to?

The format you choose has a bigger effect on file size than the quality slider alone. JPG is the classic choice for photographs: it uses lossy compression that throws away detail the eye barely notices, which makes photos very small. PNG is lossless and keeps every pixel exactly, which is perfect for logos, screenshots and graphics with sharp edges or transparency — but it produces large files for photos.

WebP is the modern middle ground. At the same visual quality it is typically 25–35% smaller than JPG, and it supports transparency like PNG. Every current browser can display WebP, so it is an excellent default for images you host on your own website. If you need maximum compatibility with old software or a form that only accepts JPEG, stick with JPG.

How image compression actually works

There are two levers that decide the final file size. The first is quality: lossy formats like JPG and WebP let you trade a little visual detail for a much smaller file. At around 70–80% quality the loss is invisible on a normal screen, while dropping toward 40% starts to show soft edges and blocky patches — useful only when you need a tiny file.

The second lever is dimensions. A 4000-pixel-wide photo contains sixteen times as many pixels as a 1000-pixel version, so setting a sensible max width is often the fastest way to reach a small target. If an image will be displayed at 800 pixels, there is no reason to store it at 4000. Combine a modest quality drop with a max width and you can usually hit any target — even a strict 20 KB — while keeping the picture perfectly usable.

Tips for hitting a target file size

When a form demands a specific limit, work with both sliders together and watch the live size readout:

• Start with JPG — it gives the smallest files for photos and is accepted almost everywhere.
• Lower the max width before crushing the quality; reducing dimensions preserves more visible sharpness per kilobyte.
• For very small targets (20–50 KB), a width of 600–800px plus 35–50% quality usually does it.
• Check the preview at 100% before you download so you know exactly how the compressed image looks.