Compress Image

Compressing to a size, not a guess

Most compressors give you a quality slider and leave you to guess. That is backwards, because you almost never care about quality as a number — you care that the file fits under an email limit, an upload cap, or a page speed budget.

This tool works the other way round. You name the size, and it repeatedly re-encodes the image at different quality levels until it finds the highest one that lands under your limit. Typically that takes five to eight attempts per image, which is why it is a second or two slower than a plain conversion, and why the result is genuinely as good as it can be at that size.

Choosing the right target

Email attachments are usually safe under 5 MB in total, so 1 MB per photo gives you room for several. Web pages want images well under 200 KB — often much less — because every kilobyte delays the page. Upload forms that reject your file will normally state their limit in the error message.

Saving as WebP instead of JPG will get you noticeably more quality at the same file size, and every current browser displays it. Stick with JPG if the file is going somewhere outside a browser.

When the target cannot be reached

Some requests are impossible — a 24-megapixel photo will not fit under 50 KB at any quality without becoming unrecognisable. When that happens the tool says so plainly rather than handing back a file that misses your limit. Use the resize option alongside it: reducing dimensions frees up far more room than compression alone.