Image compressor

How image compression works

Digital photos straight from a phone camera are usually far bigger than they need to be for the web. A single shot can weigh 4–8 MB, which makes web pages slow, eats email attachment limits and fills up storage. Compression re-encodes the image at a quality level you choose: the file gets smaller, and at sensible settings (75–85% quality) the difference is invisible to the eye.

This tool draws your image onto a browser canvas and re-saves it at your chosen quality and format. JPG is usually the best choice for photographs, WebP often goes smaller still, and PNG stays lossless — best for graphics and transparency, but it will not shrink a photo much. Move the slider, compress, and compare the before and after sizes and previews side by side; if the result looks soft, raise the quality and run it again. It costs nothing to experiment.

When should you compress an image?

• Websites and blogs: lighter images load faster, which visitors and search engines both prefer.
• Email and forms: many inboxes and upload forms cap attachments at a few megabytes.
• Marketplaces and portals: listing sites often reject oversized photos — compressing beats being refused.
• Storage: a compressed copy keeps the memories without the megabytes. Keep your original somewhere safe if it matters.

Need a different size as well as a smaller file? The image resizer changes the pixel dimensions, and the image converter switches formats — all in the same private, in-browser way. Our guide on how to compress an image without losing quality explains the settings in more depth.