Image Compressor

What this image compressor does

Photos from a modern phone are often 3 to 8 MB each. That is far more than a website, a WhatsApp status, a job portal or an email attachment needs, and many forms simply refuse anything over a few hundred KB. This tool re-encodes your image with a little less detail in the places the eye does not notice, and can also reduce its width and height, so the file becomes a fraction of its original size while still looking the same on screen.

It works on the device you are using. The images are read by your browser, compressed with the browser's own image encoder and handed back to you as downloads. Nothing is uploaded to Ur Next Door or anywhere else, so you can safely compress personal documents, ID scans and family photos.

How to use it

1. Drop one or more JPG, PNG or WebP images on the box, or tap it to choose them.
2. Pick Quality to set how much detail to keep, or Size limit to give a largest size in KB; the tool then finds the best quality that fits under it.
3. Optionally lower the Longest side. Halving the width and height roughly quarters the file size.
4. Compare the original and the compressed copy, then download one image or all of them.

Quality or size limit: which should I use?

Use Quality when you want the images to look good and only care that they get smaller, for example before sharing an album. Around 70 to 80 percent is usually indistinguishable from the original. Use Size limit when a website tells you the maximum it accepts, such as "under 200 KB". The tool tries the highest quality first and works downwards until the file fits; if even the lowest sensible quality is too big, it shrinks the dimensions step by step, and tells you when it had to.

JPG, PNG and WebP

JPG is the right choice for photographs and is accepted everywhere. WebP is a newer format that is usually 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPG at the same visible quality and is supported by all current browsers, but some older software and government portals still ask for JPG only. A PNG screenshot or logo is saved as JPG or WebP here, which makes it much smaller; transparent areas become white, because JPG cannot store transparency.

A worked example

A 4000 x 3000 pixel phone photo of 4.2 MB, compressed at 75 percent quality with the longest side set to 1920 pixels, typically comes out between 250 and 450 KB, depending on how much fine detail the scene has. A plain sky compresses far more than a crowded market street. The before and after sizes are shown for every file, so you always see exactly what you saved.

Good to know

• Compression always removes some information. Keep your original if you may want to print the photo large later.
• Compressing an already compressed JPG again saves less each time and can add blockiness; start from the original whenever you can.
• The photo's rotation from the camera is applied, and location data and other EXIF details are not copied into the new file, which is also better for privacy.
• When a form needs an exact width and height in pixels, use the Image Resizer first, then compress the result here.