Free JPG Compressor
This free tool compresses JPG photos in your browser with an adjustable quality setting, showing exactly how many bytes you saved before you download anything.
Drop images here
JPG files — add as many as you like
Runs entirely in your browser. Your images are never uploaded to a server.
How it works
- Drop one or more JPGs onto the box above, or click to choose them.
- The compressed version is created immediately and the panel shows the original size, the new size, and how much you saved.
- Slide the quality down until the saving is worth it. 75 is usually indistinguishable from the original at normal viewing size.
- Download the photo, or the whole batch as a ZIP.
Common use cases
- Getting photos under the attachment limit on an email or contact form.
- Speeding up a page carrying large hero or gallery images.
- Meeting an upload size cap on a job board, portal, or listing site.
- Shrinking a folder of holiday photos before sending or backing them up.
- Reducing image weight on a site where hosting bandwidth is metered.
Frequently asked questions
- What quality setting should I use?
- Start at 75. For most photographs that is visually indistinguishable from the original while cutting the file substantially. Below about 50 you will start to see blocking around edges and in flat areas like skies.
- Does compressing lose quality permanently?
- Yes. JPG compression discards image data to reach its size, and that loss cannot be undone. Keep the original if you might need to edit or print the photo later.
- Why did my file get bigger instead of smaller?
- Because the original was already compressed harder than the setting you chose. Re-encoding at a higher quality than the source adds data without adding detail. Lower the quality slider, or keep the original — the tool tells you when this happens rather than letting you download something worse.
- Can I compress the same photo twice?
- You can, but each pass throws away more detail permanently, and the second pass saves far less than the first. Always compress from the original rather than from an already-compressed copy.
- Does this change the image dimensions?
- No. The width and height stay exactly the same — only the file size changes. If the image is also larger than it needs to be on screen, resizing it will usually save more than compression alone.
- Are my photos uploaded to a server?
- No. Compression happens entirely in your own browser using the Canvas API. The files never leave your device, and nothing is stored.
Related tools
Understand what this does
Plain explanations of what is happening to your file, and what it costs you.
- Does compressing an image reduce quality?Sometimes, and much less than you would guess. We measured it: the first save does nearly all the damage, and after that a JPEG stops degrading entirely.
- Why is my JPEG so big?Usually too many pixels, and often invisible sensor noise — which cost us five times the file size in testing. Ranked by how much each one actually costs.
- Is it better to resize or compress an image?We hit the same file size three different ways to find out. Resizing won every time, and at the tightest budget compression could not even reach the target.
- JPG vs JPEG: is there any difference?None at all. Same format, same file, different number of letters — and here is what is really wrong when a site rejects one and accepts the other.
- Why won't my image upload?Ranked by how often each one is actually to blame — and the message on screen is frequently wrong about which of the five you have hit.
- How do I make a photo small enough to email?The published limit is not the real limit, and the quality slider will not get you under it. Reducing the dimensions will, every time.
- What size should Etsy listing photos be?The number is the easy part. The part that costs sales is that the same photo is cropped three different ways depending on where a buyer sees it.
- What is image resolution?It is the pixel count, not the DPI and not the file size. And there is no such thing as high resolution until you say what it is for.
- PNG vs JPG: which should you use?Photographs are JPG, everything else is PNG, and the reason is one difference in how the two throw information away.