About this tool
A photo straight off a phone camera is usually three to eight megabytes, and most of that detail is invisible once the picture is on a screen. Compressing it throws away the parts your eye was never going to notice and keeps the parts it will, which is how a five-megabyte photo becomes a four-hundred- kilobyte photo that looks the same.
This matters in two everyday situations. The first is an upload form with a size limit — application portals, job sites and college forms routinely cap photos at a few hundred kilobytes. The second is simply sending pictures to people on patchy mobile data, where a smaller file is the difference between arriving and spinning.
Everything here runs inside your browser. The picture is read into your device’s memory, re-encoded by your own processor, and offered back as a download. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no queue, no account, and no copy of your photograph sitting on somebody’s server.
How to use this tool
- Choose your photo. Pick a JPG, PNG or WebP from your phone or computer, or drag it onto the box. Files up to 50 MB are fine.
- Set the quality. 80 is a good starting point and looks the same as the original to most eyes. Drop to 60 if you need a much smaller file and the picture is not going to be printed.
- Pick the output format. JPG gives the smallest file. Choose PNG or WebP if the picture has a transparent background you need to keep.
- Run and download. You will see the old and new file sizes side by side, and a preview of the result before you save it.
What this tool does not do
- It does not change the width and height of the picture — use the resizer for that.
- It cannot hit an exact file size in KB. The compress-to-KB tool does that.
- Very large images can be slow on older phones, because all the work happens on your device.
- Camera raw formats such as CR2, NEF and DNG are not supported. Convert them to JPG first.
Common questions
Does my photo get uploaded anywhere?
No. The compression happens inside your browser using your own device's processor. The file is never sent to a server, which is also why it works on a slow connection and why there is nothing to delete afterwards.
Why did my file get bigger instead of smaller?
This happens when you convert an already-compressed JPG to PNG, because PNG stores every pixel exactly. The tool tells you when the result is larger than the original. Switch the output format to JPG and try again.
What quality should I use?
For a photo you are uploading to a form or sending on WhatsApp, 70 to 80 is usually indistinguishable from the original. For something being printed, stay at 90 or above. Below 50 you will start to see blocky patches in skies and skin tones.
I need the file under a specific size in KB.
Use the Compress image to KB tool instead. It works backwards from your limit rather than from a quality number, so you can ask for 'under 100 KB' directly.
Will this reduce the width and height of my photo?
No. This tool keeps the pixel dimensions exactly as they are and only changes how much detail is stored. If you need different dimensions, use the image resizer.