Compress images without uploading them
This image compressor makes photos and screenshots smaller for the web entirely inside your browser. Drop a file, choose a quality and an output format, optionally cap the width, and the page shows the size before and after, the dimensions and the percentage saved. There is no upload step, because there is no server involved: the picture is decoded, redrawn and re-encoded in this tab.
How to use it
- Drop a JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF or BMP onto the box, or click it to pick a file.
- Choose the output format. WebP is the sensible default; JPEG is the fallback for old systems.
- Move the quality slider and watch the byte count. Stop where the preview still looks right.
- If the image is wider than the space it will fill on the page, type a maximum width.
- Download the result. The file name keeps the original stem with
-compressedadded.
Why width matters more than quality
The fastest way to reduce image size for the web is not the quality slider; it is the number of pixels. A 4000-pixel phone photo shown in a 800-pixel column carries twenty-five times the pixels it needs, and no quality setting recovers that waste. Set the maximum width to the largest size the image is displayed at — doubled if you want it sharp on high-density screens — and the file often drops by 80% before quality even comes into it. The proportions are kept, and the tool never enlarges a picture that is already smaller than the limit.
Choosing the image compression quality
The quality number is a hint to the encoder, not a percentage of anything measurable. It controls how aggressively fine detail is thrown away, and the curve is steep at the top: going from 100 to 90 often halves the file, while going from 60 to 50 saves little and costs a lot. For photographs, 75 to 85 is where most sites land. Screenshots with text and flat colour behave differently — lossy formats smear sharp edges, so check the preview closely or keep a PNG for those.
To compress JPEG online and keep it a JPEG, choose JPEG as the output. Transparent areas are filled with white in that case, since JPEG has no alpha channel. WebP and AVIF keep transparency.
AVIF, WebP and what the browser can encode
Every current browser can display WebP and AVIF, but encoding is a separate question. Canvas encoding of WebP is universal; AVIF encoding depends on the browser and version. When a browser cannot produce the format it was asked for, it does not raise an error — it returns a PNG. This tool checks the type of what came back and tells you, rather than handing you a mislabelled file.
A privacy bonus: EXIF is gone
Photos from phones carry EXIF metadata: the camera model, the exact time, and often the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken. Publishing that file publishes the location. Because the output here is rebuilt from bare pixels, none of that metadata survives. The orientation tag is dropped as well, but the browser rotates the pixels before drawing, so portraits stay upright.
Once the file is lean, give it a description with the image alt checker, and if it is going to be the preview picture for a shared link, set it up with the open graph generator.