Image Compressor

A modern phone photo is routinely 4 to 12 megabytes, and a HEIC or RAW shot can be larger still. That feels harmless until you try to do something with it. Email providers cap attachments (Gmail at 25MB, many corporate mailboxes far lower), so two or three full-size photos can bounce a message. Upload forms on government portals, job sites, insurance claims, and marketplaces often reject anything over a few megabytes. Even chat apps quietly re-compress or refuse oversized files. Smaller images simply go through more places, more reliably.

Size also costs you in places you don't see: a heavy photo eats mobile data when you send it, slows down a website if you publish it, and fills cloud storage faster. Compressing a photo before you use it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do to make it portable — and unlike resizing, good compression keeps the full resolution so the picture still looks sharp.

JPEG and WebP compression throw away detail the human eye barely notices — subtle gradations in smooth areas, tiny colour shifts, high-frequency noise. The quality slider controls how aggressive that trade is. At 100% almost nothing is discarded and the file stays large; at 40% a lot is discarded and the file gets tiny but artefacts (blockiness, fuzzy edges) start to appear. The sweet spot for photographs is usually 70–80%, where the file often drops by half or more while the image looks identical at normal viewing size.

The practical advice: start at 70%, look at the result, and only push lower if you need an even smaller file and the subject is forgiving (a screenshot of text, say, tolerates less compression than a detailed landscape). Because you can see the before-and-after size for every photo here, you can dial in exactly the balance you want instead of guessing. There's no single "right" number — it depends on what the image is for.

The most common reason people compress is to get under a limit. Trying to email a batch of photos that keeps getting rejected? Drop them in, set 70%, and a 10MB attachment routinely becomes 2–3MB — small enough to send several at once. Sending over WhatsApp, Messenger, or Telegram at full quality (where the app would otherwise crush them for you)? Pre-compressing lets you control the result instead of leaving it to the app's aggressive defaults.

Upload forms are the other big one. A passport-renewal site that demands a photo "under 2MB", an eBay or Etsy listing, a school portal, a visa application — these are exactly the moments a HEIC straight off an iPhone fails twice over: wrong format and too big. Compressing here fixes the size, and because HEIC is decoded to a universal format on the way out, it fixes the compatibility at the same time.

iPhone photos are saved as HEIC, which is already an efficiently compressed format — but that doesn't help when the destination can't read HEIC or still finds the file too large. This compressor handles both problems together: it decodes the HEIC locally, then re-encodes it as a smaller JPG at the quality you choose. You get a file that is both lighter and openable everywhere, without a separate "convert" step.

If your only goal is the format change rather than shrinking, our HEIC to JPG tool does a straight conversion. But when you specifically need the file smaller — for an upload limit, an email, or just to save space — compressing HEIC here gets you there in one pass and lets you control exactly how small via the slider.

Nothing is uploaded. Every image is decoded, compressed, and re-encoded inside your browser using your own device's processor. The photo never touches a server, so we cannot see it, store it, or leak it — and there's no upload queue to wait in, no file-size cap imposed from outside, and no watermark stamped on the result.

Because the whole pipeline is local, it also keeps working after the page has loaded even if your connection drops, and large batches finish as fast as your hardware allows rather than as fast as someone else's server. No sign-up, no email, just open the page and start.