Compressing images
Make images smaller for email, web and uploads — hit a target size without visibly wrecking quality.
By EditItAll · Updated
Compression is a negotiation between file size and visible quality, and the right answer depends entirely on where the image is going. A hero image on a web page can lose detail a viewer will never notice; a photo you are printing cannot. An email attachment has a hard megabyte ceiling; a portfolio piece has a quality floor. The guides here treat compression as that negotiation rather than a single "make it smaller" button.
They all run on the EditItAll compressor, which re-encodes images with professional-grade codecs right on your device — no upload, no watermark, no per-file limit — and they cover the two questions people actually have. The first is "how do I hit a specific size", like getting a 12 MB photo under a 5 MB upload cap, which is about choosing a format and a quality level deliberately. The second is "how do I shrink this without it looking obviously worse", which is about understanding what each format throws away: JPEG discards fine color and high-frequency detail, PNG stays lossless but only shrinks flat graphics well, and modern formats like WebP and AVIF often beat both at the same visible quality.
Because it all happens locally, you can compress a whole folder of images without any of them leaving your machine — the point of the tool as much as the point of these guides.
Guides in this topic
- How do I compress a photo of a scanned document so the file is smaller but the text still reads?
- How do you make a photo smaller on your phone without an app?
- What size should product photos be for Etsy and eBay?
- How do I compress an image to fit Discord's upload limit?
- Why did compressing my PNG remove the transparency?
- How do I fix the Efficiently encode images warning in PageSpeed Insights?
- How do I make a screenshot a smaller file without making the text blurry?
- What size and file size should a LinkedIn profile photo be?
- What is the difference between lossy and lossless image compression?
- Why did my image get bigger after I compressed it?
- What JPEG quality setting should I use?
- Why does my image look worse after compressing it?
- Why do my photos look bad after I send them on WhatsApp?
- What's the difference between resizing and compressing an image?
- Why are my iPhone photos so big, and how do I make them smaller?
- Why is my PNG file so large?
- How do I compress an image to under 1 MB?
- How do I compress an image to an exact file size in KB?
- How do I compress my passport photo to 240 KB for a visa application?
- How do I compress my photo and signature for a government job application form?
- How do I make a GIF file smaller?
- How do I compress a JPEG so my web pages load fast?
- How do I compress an image to fit under a 100 KB upload limit?
- How do I compress images to a smaller size without losing visible quality?
- How do I compress a PNG file without losing quality?
- How do I compress a batch of images all at the same time?
- How to reduce image file size for email