Compress images online

A photo from a modern phone is often 3–8 MB. That is too big for many everyday tasks:

• Upload limits. Job applications, government portals, school sites and rental applications often cap images or scans at 100 KB, 200 KB, 1 MB or 2 MB.
• Email. Attachments add up quickly, and many mail services reject messages over about 20–25 MB.
• Websites and online stores. Smaller images load faster, which helps visitors on mobile data and helps your pages in search.
• Storage. Compressed copies take less space on your phone and in cloud backups.

Everything happens in your browser, and your images are never uploaded to a server. That makes the tool safe for personal photos and pictures of documents.

When a form says the file must be under 200 KB or 1 MB, you should not have to guess the quality. Choose By target size (KB), click the limit, and the tool finds the best quality that still fits.

Here is how it works:

1. It searches for the right quality. It tries a middle quality, checks whether the file fits, then steps up or down. Seven rounds are enough to land very close to the highest quality that stays under the limit.
2. It shrinks the dimensions only if it has to. JPG quality below roughly 40% starts to look blocky, so if the image still does not fit, the tool reduces the pixel size step by step instead. You can turn this off with the checkbox.
3. It tells you what happened. For each file you see the final size, the quality used and the new dimensions. If the limit could not be reached, you get the smallest version possible and a note.

Tip: pick a value slightly below the official limit (for example 190 KB for a 200 KB cap), because some sites count a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes instead of 1,024.

In the Format list, "Smallest" encodes every image as JPG (MozJPEG), WebP and AVIF and keeps whichever is smallest; for transparent images it tries PNG instead of JPG. The result shows which format won and by how much.

The encoders (MozJPEG, WebP, AVIF, OxiPNG) run on a separate thread in your browser, so the page stays responsive even with a big batch, and Safari produces the same WebP as Chrome.

Exam and application presets set common requirements in one click: a face photo under 50 KB at 276×354 pixels and 200 DPI, a signature under 20 KB, a document photo under 100 KB. If a form asks for exact pixel dimensions and DPI, enter them too; the DPI is written into the JPG header. Process up to 25 images at once, and paste an image with Ctrl+V.

By default the tool keeps the original format. For photos, switching to WebP usually gives the smallest file at the same visual quality, and every current browser can show it. If the image is going to someone who might open it in older software, stay with JPG.

PNG files are lossless, so lowering "quality" does nothing for them. The real savings for a large PNG come from smaller dimensions, or from converting a photo saved as PNG to JPG.

• 85–90%: practically indistinguishable from the original. Good for portfolios and prints.
• 70–80%: the sweet spot for websites, email and social media. Files are often 60–80% smaller.
• 50–65%: fine for thumbnails and previews; you may notice softness in fine detail.
• Below 40%: visible blocks and color banding. Use only when a strict limit leaves no choice.

The before/after slider shows the original and the compressed version on top of each other. Turn on 100% zoom to inspect fine detail such as hair, text or sky gradients, where compression artifacts show up first.

• Compressing the same JPG again and again. Each save loses a little more detail. Always start from the original file.
• Using PNG for photos. A photo saved as PNG can be several times bigger than the same photo as JPG.
• Shrinking a huge image only with quality. A 4000 × 3000 px photo shown at 1200 px wide on a website wastes bandwidth. Resize the image first, then compress.
• Forgetting metadata. Photos can carry GPS coordinates. Compressing re-encodes the image, which also drops most metadata, but if privacy is the goal, use Remove EXIF data to be sure.