Compress Images Online

1. Decide how you want to compress. Leave the slider on quality for a general reduction, or switch to a target size and type the number of kilobytes you need.
2. Choose the image on your device. Drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP onto the panel above, or press Browse files. The limit is 20 MB per file, and the file stays where it is — there is no transfer step.
3. Press Compress image. Your device re-encodes the picture and measures what came out. The panel prints the original size, the new size and the percentage saved.
4. Download the smaller file. Check the numbers first. If the saving is not enough, move the slider or set a target size and run it again — there is no quota to use up.

A quality slider cannot answer “make this 100 KB”. Quality is a perceptual setting, and the number of bytes it produces depends entirely on the picture: a flat studio shot and a photo of a forest come out at wildly different sizes from the same setting.

So the target mode measures instead of guessing. Your device encodes the image, reads the real byte length back, and binary-searches the quality range for the best-looking version that still fits under your number — around eight encodes at most, none of which sends a byte anywhere. The result lands at or just below the target, never above it.

If even the smallest encode overshoots, you get told the smallest size actually achievable for that image rather than a file that misses the requirement. Job portals, government forms and university applications are the usual reason people need this, and they reject anything over the stated limit.

Quality 90 keeps a file that still looks untouched next to the original and is the right choice when the image will be edited again later. Quality 80 is the web default and the setting to reach for when you are not sure — a 4 MB phone photo usually lands somewhere between 400 KB and 700 KB.

Quality 60 to 70 is aggressive but still fine for a photograph viewed on a screen at normal size. Below 50 the artefacts become visible: blocking around hard edges, and banding across skies and other smooth gradients.

JPEG is lossy, so quality is a real dial and the file responds to it immediately. WebP is also lossy and typically produces a file 25 to 35 percent smaller than a JPEG at the same visual quality, which is why it is worth converting to.

PNG is lossless — it stores every pixel exactly, so there is no quality to trade. The slider reduces the number of colours in the image instead. That works extremely well on logos, icons, diagrams and screenshots, which use few colours to begin with, and badly on photographs, which end up banded. PNG compression reduces colours, so it is best for graphics, not photos.

• Email attachments, where most providers cap a single message near 25 MB.
• WordPress and other CMS installs that refuse anything over a 2 MB upload limit.
• Shopify, Etsy and eBay product photos, where page weight affects how fast a listing loads.
• Chat apps such as Discord, which re-compresses or rejects anything over its own cap.
• Job portals and government forms that demand a photo or scan under 100 KB or 200 KB.
• Assembling a PDF, where a handful of full-resolution photos can make the document unusable.

This tool accepts JPEG, PNG and WebP up to 20 MB per file and 8000 pixels on the longest side. The output keeps the format it came in with; use the converter if you want a different one.

The compressing is done by your own device — the file is opened where it already is and the smaller copy is written on the same machine, so nothing is transmitted and there is no copy of your photo anywhere else. Because the output is built from raw pixels, it carries no EXIF or GPS data and no longer says where the photo was taken.

The practical ceiling is your hardware rather than a policy. A photograph has to be unpacked into raw pixels before it can be re-encoded, which takes several times the file size in memory, so an old phone will refuse a job a laptop takes happily. The panel works that out before it starts and tells you what to try instead.