Compress Image

🔒 Runs in your browser — files are never uploaded

Shrink a JPG or PNG's file size while keeping it looking good. Great for email attachments, websites, and forms with upload limits.

How it works
  • Select a JPG or PNG image from your device.
  • Set the target maximum file size in megabytes. For a 200 KB target, enter 0.2; for 100 KB, enter 0.1.
  • Click Compress Image. The result downloads automatically and the before and after sizes are shown.

Hitting a specific size limit

Most people arrive here because a form has rejected their photo. Government portals, job applications and exam registrations routinely cap uploads at 100 KB, 200 KB or 500 KB, while a photo straight off a modern phone is 4 MB or more — twenty to forty times too big.

The target box is in megabytes, so convert first: 100 KB is 0.1, 200 KB is 0.2, 500 KB is 0.5, and 1 MB is 1. The tool then works backwards from that number, trying progressively stronger compression until the file fits underneath it, so what you get out is at or below the size you asked for rather than merely “smaller”.

How much can you compress before it shows?

Further than most people expect. A phone photo at 4 MB compressed to 500 KB — an 87% reduction — is usually indistinguishable at normal viewing size, because most of the original file is detail your eye discards anyway. Below roughly 150 KB for a full-size photo you begin to see the classic signs: soft blocky patches in areas of flat colour like skin and sky, and halos around sharp edges such as text.

Two kinds of image suffer earliest. Screenshots and images containing text degrade quickly and visibly, because JPEG compression is built for photographic gradients rather than hard edges — keep these as PNG if you can, or compress them gently. Images with large flat areas show banding sooner than busy, detailed photos, which hide compression artefacts well.

If you can't hit a very small target, reduce the dimensions instead of compressing harder. A 4000-pixel-wide photo squeezed into 100 KB looks far worse than the same photo resized to 1200 pixels wide and then compressed to 100 KB — at that size it needs barely any compression at all. Resize first, then compress.

What the tool does to your image

Two things. It re-encodes the image at a lower JPEG quality, and it caps the longest edge at 2560 pixels — large enough for any screen and for printing at normal sizes, while removing resolution that only inflates the file. Compression is lossy and cannot be undone, so the tool always writes a new file prefixed compressed- and never touches your original.

Nothing is uploaded

The compression runs in your browser. This matters more than it sounds for exactly the images people compress most: passport photographs, signatures, ID scans and certificates submitted to application portals. Those files never leave your device here, so there is no server-side copy of your identity document sitting in someone's temporary folder.

Frequently asked questions

How do I compress an image to 100 KB?
Enter 0.1 in the target size box, since the field is in megabytes. For 200 KB enter 0.2, and for 500 KB enter 0.5. The tool compresses until the file fits under that figure.
Will compressing ruin the quality?
Usually not visibly. Cutting a 4 MB phone photo to 500 KB is rarely noticeable at normal viewing size. Quality loss becomes visible below roughly 150 KB for a full-size photo, and sooner for screenshots or images containing text.
Are my images uploaded to a server?
No. Compression runs in JavaScript in your browser and the image never leaves your device — which matters for the ID photos and signatures people most often need to compress.
Why can't it reach the very small size I asked for?
Because the image has too many pixels for that target. Resize it to around 1200 pixels wide first with the Resize Image tool, then compress — the combination reaches small targets while looking much better.
Does it work on PNG files too?
Yes, though PNG compresses less dramatically than JPG. For screenshots and graphics with text, PNG keeps edges sharp; for photographs, JPG will always get much smaller.
Can I undo the compression later?
No. Compression discards image data permanently. The tool saves a new file prefixed compressed- so your original stays intact — keep it.
Is there a limit on how many images I can compress?
No. There is no daily cap, no account, and no watermark. Compress as many as you like, one at a time.