How to Compress an Image: Online and for Free

In the modern world, where visual content is all over the place, you probably often have the need to compress images to post them online. But you don’t have any photo editors and frankly speaking, you don’t want to deal with some advanced, complex software to perform a simple task, right? You can solve this issue with our online image compressor! Within just a few clicks, you can drastically reduce the file size of your photos! Are you worried that you won’t be able to do this because you don’t have any skills or knowledge in image editing? That’s okay! In our app, everything is simple, clear and fast.

Our video guide will make it easier for you to understand how everything works. Watch it here and get to compressing your images.

Here are the main benefits of our free photo compressor. You can:

• compress multiple images in one go;
• compress images of any format – JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, HEIC;
• process unlimited number of files;
• compress images to a specific size in kBs or MBs;
• download your compressed files almost instantly;
• compress photos without any quality loss if necessary;
• make use of additional options like keeping metadata or renaming files;
• utilize additional free tools to do some basic image editing: add text to an image, add a logo to a photo, crop images online, use watermark maker, resize your images and more.

Quality after Image Compression. Different Options

In our photo compressor you have to pick the level of image compression. You need to understand the difference between the options since this will affect the quality of your compressed images. There are three options: Best Quality, Smaller Size or Specific File Size. You can compress photos by 85 to 99% depending on whether you need to maintain good image quality or drastically decrease the file size.

Let’s take a look at what options for photo compressing our app offers:

• Best Quality: If you need to compress photos without sacrificing image quality all that much, this is the option to go for. However, please note that depending on the file format of your images, there still might be some loss of quality. With this option, the level of compression is low. Thus, image quality is preserved as much as possible. If you compare the compressed image with the original one, you won’t see much of a difference. Compared to the other two options, this one produces compressed images that have excellent image quality but a bigger file size.
• Smaller Size: This option is kind of the opposite of the previous one. Here, the level of compression is high. Thus, you will get images of a smaller file size. Our app will do its best to maintain the image quality at a decent level. However, if you need a small file size, there’s no other way but to sacrifice some image quality. Naturally, this option is ideal for those who need to compress images to dramatically reduce their file size.
• Specific File Size: With the previous two options, the only way to know what file size your images will have is wait until the app is done compressing them. But here, you will have more flexibility and control over this aspect. If you go for this option, you will need to enter a specific number of kBs or MBs. Then, our image compressor will compress your images so that they have the file size that you need. This option gives you not only flexibility but also some room for experimentation – you can compress one and the same batch of images using different files sizes. The file size is interconnected with image quality. The smaller the file size, the lower the quality. Thus, you can try out different file sizes and see which one will give you the desired result.

Since our photo compressor automatically creates copies and works only with them, you won’t have to worry about your original files. Even if something goes wrong during the compression process – which is highly unlikely! – or if you aren’t satisfied with the final result, you will easily be able to re-upload your originals and compress them in a different way.

Why You Should Compress Images for Your Website: Five Key Points

Have you ever checked what the load time of your web pages is? In other words, how long does it take for a webpage of your website to fully load? The ideal time for a webpage is around 2 – 2.5 seconds. 3 seconds can sometimes be okay, but a considerable number of people won’t wait this long. Yes, you got it right.

If it takes longer than 2 seconds for a webpage to load, people will leave your website and go elsewhere.

This will have a negative effect on your websites performance; not to mention that if you sell a service or a product, you will basically lose potential customers. You need to make sure that your webpages load quickly if you want to keep precious visitors on your website.

Okay, so, what if you checked the load time and found out that it takes longer than 3 seconds? Do you have a lot of visual content on that webpage? If the answer is yes, the load time might be long because you didn’t compress your images before publishing them on your website. Below, you will learn more about the connection between image compression and optimizing your website and, thus, increasing its traffic.

Here are 5 reasons why you should compress photos for your website:

1. By compressing your images, you will make them load faster. When you compress a photo, you make its file size smaller. Thus, it will load faster, and a visitor of your website will see it quicker. This will surely have a positive impact on user experience and your search engine optimization. At the end of 2021, Google included a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals in its search algorithm. One of the three metrics it tracks is LCP (Largest Contentful Paint ). In simple words, this is how much time it takes for the main content on a web page to fully load. If it takes 2.5 seconds or less, your webpage will be assessed as good.
2. Uploading will take less time if you compress your images. The larger the file size, the longer it will take you to upload images onto your website. Compression can save you some extra minutes that you can use for more important things other than waiting. If you want to compress images for you website, here are some optimal sizes for various types of images that you can make use of: not more than 1MB for banners, backgrounds and any other large images, 500-600 kB for images in your product gallery or portfolio, 300 kB for small graphics. You can learn more here - How to Optimize Images for Your Website.
3. Compressed images are more space-efficient. Thanks to photo compression, your images will have a smaller file size. Thus, they will take up less storage space not only on your website, but also on your hard drives or in a cloud storage if you keep local backups of them. Since visual content – be it images or videos – usually takes up much more space than, say, text, it makes perfect sense to reduce its file size. At the same time, your visual content still needs to look good, so it might also be vital for any quality loss to be unnoticeable. Fortunately, compressing images can help you achieve both of these things.
4. Image compression doesn’t change pixel dimensions of your images. If you want to create a slideshow or a gallery that contains your photo works or images of your products, it would be better if your images have similar pixel dimensions. This way, they will look harmonious. Thus, it might be important for you to know that after compression the pixel dimensions of your images won’t change. However, you need to be aware of the fact that our online image compressor might change the resolution of your image. For instance, if your original image has a resolution of 300 dpi, then your compressed image might have a resolution of 96 dpi.
5. Compressed images won’t use up a lot of mobile data. When people visit your website using mobile internet, their phones download data, including images, from your website. This will use up some of their mobile data. Usually, mobile internet has a limit for this. For example, it can be 5 GBs per month. If a person exceeds this limit, they won’t have access to the internet until pay some extra money. No one is going to be happy about this. If your website has images of large file size, this will use up a decent amount of mobile data of your website’s visitors. Thus, you should compress photos if you want people to have a positive user experience.

As you can see, it’s important to check the file size of your visual content before uploading it to your website. Even when image compression is done, it might still be a good idea to check what size your files have. Otherwise, you might accidentally upload large-sized images which will drive visitors away, and that will impact your website’s performance and ranking in a negative way.

Can image quality degrade after image compression?

The way compression works is some redundant data, including pixels, is removed from your image to reduce its file size. Thus, when you compress an image, you reduce its quality to some degree. But you will be able to see these changes only if you really zoom in on an image. Image compression should be avoided if you want to, say, print a photo. But it’s a perfect way to reduce the file size of images that you want to post online. Image compression has a huge number of benefits if it’s done properly.

Here are a few examples of images that were compressed with our free photo compressor.

Compress Photos for Social Media

You might be under the impression that when it comes to posting visual content on social media, the bigger your image is, the better. But this is wrong. Such platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn have their size limitations. If you upload a large-sized image of high resolution to any of these platforms, they will make it fit their size requirements whether you want it or not.

Except that their image compressors work automatically, and they don’t care about your image looking as good as possible. They need to handle huge amounts of visual content that’s uploaded on a daily basis. So, they want your image to occupy as little storage space as possible. Compression helps them with that. But because of this automatic compression, your uploaded images can look as if they have a terrible quality.

For instance, according to the Instagram requirements the width of images should vary from 320 px to 1080 px. Once you upload a photo wider than 1080 pixels, it will be compressed automatically, and some quality loss will unavoidably occur. When you post an image smaller than 320 px, it will be enlarged. Both of these will result in your image looking blurry, unsharp and pixelated.

If you want to make sure that your visual content looks good once you post it on your social media account, you should compress your photos as well as resize them, so they meet the necessary size requirements.

Here are the recommended images sizes for popular platforms:

• Facebook – 1200 x 630 px;
• Instagram – 1080 x1080 px (square images), 1080 x 1350 px (portraits), 1080 x 608 px (landscapes);
• X - 1024 x 512 px;
• LinkedIn - 1200 x 627 px;
• Pinterest - 600 x 900 px;
• YouTube - 1280 x 720 px.

Our free image compressor is not only easy to use, but also incredibly reliable. With it, you will always get great results no matter what. You compressed images will look sharp, crisp and professional. After all, if you took some amazing photos, but then an automatic compressor made them look blurry and pixelated, people won’t really be able to enjoy them, right? And as you know, the better your images look, the more engagement you will get. And that will surely improve your visibility on your favorite social media platform.

Compress Photos to Meet Email Size Limits

It’s better to compress images before sending via email to ensure faster sending and better bandwidth. It will take more time for a large-sized image to upload. As a result, your email may bounce back or get marked as spam. This can be avoided if you reduce the file size of your images. It will make sharing them much more convenient.

Pretty much all mail services have a size limit for attachments. Usually, it’s around 10-25 MBs per letter. Thus, if you have several images of around 10 MBs, you will be able to send only 1 or 2 of them. The same goes for messengers. For example, WhatsApp allows you to upload a file that has a size no bigger than 16 MBs. So, if your image is bigger than this, you won’t be able to send it at all! Image compression can help you reduce the file size of your image from 10 MBs to 1 MB or less. This way, you will be able to send from 10 to 25 images in a single letter. That’s quite a difference, right?

Compressing images to send them over an email or a messenger might seem intimidating, but you might be surprised how simple it actually is. All you need to do is upload your photos into our free online image compressor and choose one of three options – Better Quality, Smaller Size or Specific File Size. If you go for the latter, you will also need to enter a specific number of kBs or MBs. The level of compression will vary depending on which option you choose. Then you simply start the compression process which is done automatically! Once your images are compressed, all that’s left to do is download and send them.

Summing Up

Image compression can be useful in a variety of situations. If you need to store a lot of visual content, it is better to compress the images to save disk space on your device and also reduce cloud storage costs. Thanks to compression, you can improve the load time of your website. This can positively impact your search engine rankings as well as increase conversion rate. Since compressed images are smaller, it will take you less time to upload them to your website or social media, which will surely speed up your workflow. By compressing photos before sharing them online, you will make sure that they will look good and have the desired quality. You will be able to send more files by email, too.

FAQs

How to compress a photo in JPG format?

JPEG is not just one of the most popular and wide-spread formats on the web, it’s also one of the easiest to compress. You can do this with pretty much any image editing app, including ours. With our image compressor, you will be able to compress your photos quickly and effortlessly – just upload your images, choose one of the three options for compression and click the “Compress Images” button.

How many photos can I send via email?

This depends on the file size of your photos. All mail services have an attachment size limit. For example, if you’re using Gmail, your attachments shouldn’t exceed 25 MBs collectively. A single high-quality JPEG photo can be around 10 or 15 MBs. Thus, if you don’t compress photos, you will be able to send only 1 or 2 of them. But there’s a high chance that the images that you need to send don’t need to have the best quality possible. So, you can easily reduce the file size of your images to a couple of hundred kilobytes by compressing them. After you compress photos, you will be able to attach dozens of them to a single letter.

How can I compress a photo to send by email?

You can use our online image compressor! It allows you to upload a batch of multiple images in one go. And the app itself is easy to master. You simply need to upload your files into our photo compressor and choose what level of compression you want. In just a couple of minutes, you will have your images compressed and ready to be sent by email.

How to compress an image on an Android smartphone?

You can use our browser-based image compressor for that! It works on both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. You will need only two things – a browser and access to the internet. You won’t have to download or install anything. To compress your images, open your mobile browser, go to our website and open the “Compress Photos” webpage. Import your image into the app, specify the settings and start the compressing process. All done! Easy, isn’t it?