Image Compressor
Compress JPG, PNG, and WebP images in your browser. Drop several at once, tune the quality, and download smaller files - nothing is uploaded.
- Free, no account
- No watermark
- No usage limit
About the Image Compressor
Most image compressors hand you a quality slider and turn a simple job into a guessing game. Drag it to 70, download, and it is still too big. Back to 55 and now the photo looks soft, so you split the difference and try yet again. It is a waste of your time, and it is backwards, because nobody actually cares what "quality 62" means. What you need is a file under 200 KB. So this one lets you say exactly that. Tell it the upload form caps you at 200 KB, type 200 into the target size box, and it hunts down the quality that lands there for you. It compresses JPG, PNG, and WebP, even the HEIC files straight off an iPhone, one image or fifty in a batch, and not one of them is uploaded anywhere. The whole thing runs on your own machine, so a stack of 4 MB phone photos shrinks in a second or two and the files never leave your device.
How to use
- Drop your images in. Click the box, drag several images in at once, or paste an image straight from your clipboard. HEIC, PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, it reads them all. Drop something animated and it counts the frames right there and tells you, before you press the button, that only the first one is coming out.
- Pick an output format. WebP for the smallest everyday files, JPG when you need it to open anywhere, PNG for transparency or lossless quality, AVIF when you want the smallest possible and your viewers are on current browsers.
- Decide how to size it. Two options, and you use one. Either drag the quality slider down until the file is small enough, or type a number into Target size (KB) and let the tool reach that for you. Set a target on JPG or WebP and the slider disappears, because you no longer need it. AVIF is the exception and works the other way around, slider only, and the panel tells you so where the target box would have been.
- Rotate or flip, if the shot needs it. The transform buttons stand a sideways phone photo upright or mirror it before the file is saved.
- Compress, then download. Each row shows the old size next to the new one, and the summary line up top gives the total saved across the batch. Save files one by one, or hit Download all (ZIP) to grab the whole set at once.
No sign-up, no watermark, no waiting in a queue. It does not work offline, though, which is a separate thing from the privacy claim and worth saying up front. The compressors are only fetched when you press Compress for the first time, so that first run needs a connection even though your photos themselves never leave the machine.
Name a size, skip the guessing game
Every free compressor I have used has the same blind spot. It shows you a quality percentage but not the file size you will actually end up with, and quality is almost never the thing you are fighting. You are fighting a hard limit somebody else set: the passport upload that rejects anything over 240 KB, the forum that caps avatars at 100 KB, the email that bounces past 25 MB, the hero image that has to fit a page-speed budget. A quality number tells you none of that. So you compress, check the size, nudge the slider, and grind through the loop again.
Target size ends that loop. You hand it the ceiling in kilobytes, it tries a quality, checks the result, and keeps adjusting until the file drops under your number, all in one pass. Run a batch and every file gets aimed at the same target, which is a genuine time saver when a whole set has to clear one hard limit.
Target size works on JPG and WebP. Both encode fast enough that the tool can compress, measure, adjust, and go again, up to eight rounds per image, and you never see the loop happen. AVIF is left out of that on purpose, because eight passes through its encoder would leave you watching a progress bar for minutes on a batch of any size. So AVIF gets the quality slider instead and the panel tells you why, which beats taking a number nothing was ever going to chase. PNG is lossless, there is no knob to turn at all, so nothing appears for it either.
Format choice matters a lot here. WebP packs noticeably more picture into the same kilobytes than JPG does, so when you are squeezing a photo under something tight like 50 KB, WebP stays clean where JPG turns blocky and muddy. Small target plus quality you care about, WebP is the format to reach for.
Point a huge 24-megapixel photo at a tiny target, though, and there is only so far quality can drop before the encoder runs out of room. It lands as close as it can rather than hitting an impossible number, and it counts the files that stayed over your number and says so above the list, so a miss is never something you have to spot yourself. Start from a sensibly sized image and a realistic target and it does exactly what you would want.
Check it actually got smaller
After a batch runs, the summary line up top shows the total percent saved and turns green when the whole set came out smaller. Below it, every row lists its old size next to the new one. Glance down that list before you trust the output. Now and then a file barely shrinks, or lands heavier than it started, which usually means it was already squeezed about as far as it sensibly goes, so keep the original when that happens. Comparing the before and after on each row is how you avoid shipping a file that is actually bigger than what you started with, which is easy to do without noticing when someone already ran the image through a compressor before it reached you.
There is a related judgment call the tool cannot make for you. Not every image wants heavy compression. Screenshots, logos, and anything with crisp text or hard edges survive far better as PNG or WebP than as JPG, which smears sharp lines into fuzzy halos and ghosts thin strokes. Photos are the opposite story, skies, skin, and smooth gradients are where lossy compression does its best work and where the biggest savings come from. Match the format to the kind of picture and you get small files that still look right.
Frequently asked questions
Can I compress HEIC photos straight from my iPhone?
Yes. Drop the .heic files in like any other image, choose JPG or WebP as the output, and you get a normal, shareable file that opens anywhere. HEIC is space-efficient but plenty of websites and older programs cannot read it, so converting while you compress clears two hurdles in one step. The originals sitting on your phone stay untouched.
What happens to an animated GIF?
Only the first frame survives, and you are told that before you press the button rather than after. The four output formats here are WebP, JPG, PNG and AVIF, and every one of them holds a single still picture, so a 48 frame GIF comes back as frame one and nothing else. Drop one in and the panel reads the frame count straight out of the file and says so above the controls, which is the moment it is still worth knowing. That makes this a fine way to pull a thumbnail or a poster frame out of a clip, and the wrong tool entirely if the motion is the point. The same is true of an animated WebP and of an APNG, both of which look like ordinary still files from the outside, so both get counted and called out the same way.
Does compressing keep transparency?
If your image has transparent areas and you keep the output as PNG or WebP, they are preserved. JPG cannot store transparency at all, so if you convert a transparent PNG to JPG the tool paints white behind the see-through parts instead of letting them turn black, which is the ugly default you would get otherwise. For a logo that has to stay transparent, choose PNG or WebP and never JPG.
Why is my compressed file sometimes bigger than the original?
A few normal reasons. If the source was already squeezed hard by another tool, re-compressing it can add a little weight back rather than removing more. Converting a small flat-color PNG, an icon say, into JPG can balloon it too, because JPG handles hard edges and big solid blocks poorly. And nudging the quality slider up toward 100 on a photo produces a large file by design. If a file comes out bigger, the old and new sizes on its row make it obvious, so keep the original in that case.
What happens to my location and camera data?
It gets removed. As the image is re-saved, the pixels are kept and the embedded metadata, GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamps, is discarded. That is a privacy gain, since your home location is no longer riding along inside a photo you post, and it shaves off a little size on top. One side effect to know about, that same metadata holds a rotation flag on some phone photos, so a shot that relied on it to display upright can come out sideways once the flag is gone. If that happens, straighten it with the transform button and save again.
How big an image can I actually compress?
There is no fixed cap like the "5 MB, 20 files" limits you see on server tools, because there is no server here, your own device does the work. Two real ceilings sit under that, and both get told to you rather than guessed at. Your browser will only render an image surface so large, and that number moves with the browser, the device and the year, so instead of publishing a figure that would be wrong on half the machines out there the tool asks your browser directly and says so when the answer is no. And a dropped folder gets walked to the first 3,000 files, with a message saying it stopped, so the rest go in on a second drop. Ordinary photos and even 50-megapixel camera files process fine. If a genuinely enormous scan refuses to load it is bumping into that surface limit, so scale it down elsewhere first.
Can I use it offline, or on a locked-down work laptop?
The locked-down laptop, yes. Nothing installs, so there is nothing for IT to block, and it runs inside a browser tab you already have open. Offline, no. The page opens as fast as it does because the parts that actually write a JPG, a PNG, a WebP or an AVIF are fetched when you press Compress rather than when the page loads, and the AVIF one alone runs to several megabytes, which is exactly why nobody would want it arriving up front. Checking the built page confirms none of them is among the scripts that come with it, so a first run with the connection down gives you an error rather than a smaller file.
Where your photos go does not change. They stay on your device from start to finish, which is the reason this is safe for confidential or sensitive images, and it is a narrower claim than the offline one but it is the true one.