Compress Images
Your files stay on this device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server.
Drop your files here
or pick them from your device
How it works
- Drop your images onto the bench, or pick them from your device.
- Pick a quality level, or type the size you need to hit. Then press Compress.
- Download the smaller files one at a time, or all of them as a .zip.
Most of the weight in a photograph is detail your eye was never going to notice. JPG compression works by throwing that detail away on purpose: it splits the picture into small blocks, describes each one as a set of frequencies, and then rounds the high-frequency parts — fine texture, faint noise — more aggressively than the rest. The quality slider is really a rounding dial. At 90 the rounding is gentle and almost invisible. At 60 flat areas start to look blotchy and hard edges pick up a faint halo.
This matters when something else sets a limit for you: a 5 MB cap on a job application, a web form that refuses anything over 2 MB, an email that bounces, a page that loads slowly on a phone. Pick a target size and this tool searches for the highest quality that still fits, instead of making you guess at the slider and check the result six times.
PNG behaves completely differently and it is worth knowing why. PNG is lossless — it never discards detail, it only looks for repetition. That works beautifully on screenshots, logos and line art with large flat areas, and badly on photographs, where almost no two neighbouring pixels are alike. Re-compressing a PNG photo usually saves very little. If the result would come out larger than what you started with, this tool keeps your original file and says so rather than handing you a worse one.
One thing to keep in mind: compression is not reversible. Save over your only copy at quality 50 and the detail is gone for good. Compress copies, keep the originals.
Questions people ask
- Are my images uploaded to a server?
- No. The compression happens in this page, using your browser's own image encoder. The files are read from your disk into the tab's memory and nothing is sent anywhere. Close the tab and it is all gone.
- What quality setting should I use?
- For photos going on the web or into a document, 75 to 85 is the usual sweet spot — a large drop in file size for a difference most people cannot see. Go below 60 only when a hard size limit forces you to. For images with text or sharp graphics, stay above 85.
- Why did my PNG barely get smaller?
- PNG is lossless, so it can only save space by finding repeated patterns. Screenshots and flat-colour graphics compress well; photographs saved as PNG hardly compress at all. If the file is a photograph, converting it to JPG will shrink it far more than compressing the PNG ever will.
- Why did one of my files come back unchanged?
- Because re-encoding it came out bigger than the original. That happens with files that are already well compressed. Rather than give you a larger file and call it compression, the tool keeps your original and marks it as unchanged.
- Are the image dimensions changed?
- No. The pixel width and height stay exactly the same — only the way those pixels are stored changes. If you want fewer pixels as well, resize the image first and then compress it.
- Can I get back the quality later?
- No. The discarded detail is not recoverable by any tool, including this one. Always compress a copy and keep the original somewhere safe.