How to reduce photo file size

For email, web, and uploads · ~5 min read · by kizura

Photos from modern phones and cameras are often 5–15 MB each — too big to email, slow to upload, and heavy on websites. Here's how to shrink them quickly without a visible quality drop, all free and in your browser.

The fastest method (2 steps)

1. Compress. Open the compressor, drop your photo, and set quality to around 80%. You'll usually see the file shrink by 60–80% instantly. For many photos at once, drop them all — batch is unlimited and you can download a ZIP.

2. Resize if still large. If a photo is enormous (e.g. 6000px wide) but will only be viewed on screen, use the resize tool to bring the long edge down to ~1600–2000px. This alone can cut size by half or more.

Which format should I use?

For photos, JPG at 80% is the safe universal choice. WEBP is even smaller (25–35%) and works everywhere modern — use the converter. Avoid PNG for photographs; it's meant for graphics and produces huge files for photos. See the format guide.

Target sizes

For email, aim under 5 MB per photo (most limits are 10–25 MB total). For websites, aim for 100–300 KB per image — see our web optimization guide. For messaging apps, almost anything under 2 MB sends instantly.

Frequently asked

Does compressing lose quality? At 75–85% the loss is usually invisible, while the file shrinks a lot.
Is it private? Yes — everything runs on your device, nothing is uploaded.
Can I do many at once? Yes, batch is unlimited and exports a ZIP.

Start now with the free compressor.

The four levers, measured on the same photo

Every method of shrinking an image is one of four levers: fewer pixels, a more efficient format, lower quality, or stripped metadata. To see what each is really worth, we took one 2,400×1,864 high-detail test photo saved as a 2,683 KB JPG (quality 92) and pulled each lever alone, then all of them together.

Same source image and encoder for every row; only the named variable changed.

The ranking surprises most people: dimensions beat everything. Halving the pixel count roughly halves the file before quality even enters the conversation, because file size scales with the number of pixels the encoder has to describe. It is also the only lever with no visual cost when the image is displayed smaller than its pixel size anyway — a 4,000 px camera photo shown in an 800 px blog column is carrying 25× more pixels than the reader can see.

The order that preserves the most quality

• Step 1 — Resize to the largest size the image will actually be viewed at. Web page column? 1,200–1,600 px. Email? 1,600 px is generous. Full-screen wallpaper? Match the display.
• Step 2 — Pick the format for the content. Photo → JPG or WebP. Screenshot, logo, chart → PNG or lossless WebP (see the conversion guide for measured proof of why).
• Step 3 — Lower quality until just before you can tell. For photos that is usually q75–85; go by eye with the live preview in the compressor, not by a magic number.
• Step 4 — Strip metadata. Phone photos carry EXIF blocks (camera data, GPS, sometimes a full-resolution thumbnail) that can add tens of KB and, more importantly, leak your location — the EXIF remover handles both problems at once.

Hitting a specific number

When a form says “maximum 500 KB” or “under 1 MB”, work backwards from the table above. A 12-megapixel phone photo is typically 3–6 MB out of camera; resizing it to 1,600 px and exporting at q80 lands most photos in the 300–800 KB range in one pass. If you are still over, drop to 1,200 px before you drop below q70 — the resolution cut is less visible than the compression artifacts at that point. For batches, the compressor processes every file with the same settings and hands back a single ZIP, so a folder of holiday photos becomes an email-able archive in one step.