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Free Image Tool

Image Compressor

Reduce JPEG, PNG, or WebP file size by re-encoding at a chosen quality. See before/after sizes side-by-side.

  • Free · no sign-up
  • Instant results
  • Privacy-friendly

Choose an image and a target quality. The compressed file will download immediately; original and compressed sizes are visible in the response headers.

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What compression is doing to your image

Upload a JPEG, PNG or WebP, pick a quality level between 10 and 100, and the image is re-encoded at that setting. You get the before and after byte counts side by side so you can see exactly what the setting bought you, then download the result.

Quality here is not a percentage of visual fidelity — it is a dial controlling how aggressively fine detail is discarded. Lowering it makes the encoder round off subtle colour and brightness variation that the eye is poor at noticing. The savings are real and usually large, because photographs contain far more detail than a screen at typical viewing size can resolve.

Choosing a quality setting

For almost all web photography, quality between 75 and 85 is the sweet spot. It typically removes 60 to 80 percent of the file size with no difference a visitor would notice on a normal screen. Below about 60, artefacts start to appear in smooth gradients — skies, skin, shadows — as visible banding or blocky patches. Above 90 the file grows quickly for improvements almost nobody can see.

The right setting also depends on content. Photographs with lots of texture hide compression well. Flat graphics, screenshots, logos and anything containing text are far less forgiving: lossy compression smears the sharp edges of letterforms, producing the fuzzy halo that makes a screenshot look cheap. For those, keep quality high or use PNG.

Compression is one-way — always keep the original

Discarded detail is gone. Re-saving at a higher quality afterwards cannot bring it back; it simply stores the already-degraded image in a bigger file. This is the single most common and most costly mistake with image compression.

It also means repeated cycles accumulate damage. Compress, edit, re-save, compress again and each pass degrades the result further — generation loss, the same phenomenon as photocopying a photocopy. Keep your master file, compress once as the final step before publishing, and always compress from the original rather than from a previously compressed copy.

Picking the right format

Format choice often saves more than the quality slider does:

  • JPEG — photographs and complex images with no transparency. Universally supported, and still a reasonable default.
  • PNG — screenshots, logos, line art, and anything needing transparency or crisp edges. Lossless, so text stays sharp, but files are much larger for photographic content.
  • WebP — usually 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality, supports transparency, and is supported by every current browser. For most web use it is now the better choice.

Resize before you compress

The largest saving available is almost never the quality slider — it is dimensions. A 4000-pixel-wide photo from a phone displayed in a 800-pixel column carries twenty-five times more pixels than the layout can use, and compression cannot recover that waste. Resizing to roughly the display size, then compressing, routinely turns a 6 MB upload into something under 200 KB.

This matters beyond page weight. Largest Contentful Paint is a Core Web Vitals metric and a ranking signal, and on most pages the largest element is an image. Oversized images are one of the most common causes of a failing LCP score, particularly for visitors on mobile connections.

Frequently asked questions

What quality setting should I use? #
For web photographs, 75 to 85 is the sweet spot — typically 60 to 80 percent smaller with no visible difference. Go higher for images containing text or sharp edges, where lossy compression smears letterforms noticeably.
Does compressing reduce image quality? #
Yes, that is the mechanism — fine detail is discarded to save space. At sensible settings the loss is invisible at normal viewing size. The important part is that it is permanent, so always keep your original file.
Can I restore an image after compressing it? #
No. Discarded detail cannot be recovered, and re-saving at higher quality only makes a bigger file containing the same degraded image. Keep the master and compress a copy as the last step before publishing.
Why is my PNG barely getting smaller? #
PNG is lossless, so it cannot discard detail the way JPEG does. For photographic content, converting to JPEG or WebP will shrink it dramatically. Keep PNG only where you need transparency or perfectly sharp text and line art.
Should I use WebP instead of JPEG? #
For most web images, yes. WebP is generally 25 to 35 percent smaller at equivalent quality, supports transparency, and every current browser handles it. Keep JPEG only where a specific older tool or platform requires it.
Will compressing images help my Google ranking? #
Indirectly but genuinely. Largest Contentful Paint is a Core Web Vitals metric used as a ranking signal, and the largest element on most pages is an image. Resizing to display dimensions before compressing usually helps LCP far more than the quality slider alone.
What happens to my uploaded image? #
It is held in memory only long enough to re-encode and return the compressed file, then discarded. It is not added to any gallery, index, or training set.