JPG Compressor

What this compressor actually changes

Your JPG is decoded and saved again as a JPG at quality 75 out of 100. The quality is fixed: there is no slider and no target-size option. Width and height are not changed, so a 4000 × 3000 photo is still 4000 × 3000 pixels afterwards. Colour detail is stored at half resolution (4:2:0 subsampling), the usual JPG setting, which can slightly soften thin coloured lines such as red text on a white background.

Because the file is rebuilt, the embedded metadata is not carried over. Camera and date fields, GPS location and the embedded colour profile are all gone from the result. If the photo relied on an EXIF rotation flag to display upright, the rotation is applied to the pixels first, so it still looks upright without the flag. No colour conversion is applied before the colour profile is dropped, so an image in a wide-gamut space such as Adobe RGB or Display P3 can look different afterwards (see how colour profiles work).

Will my JPG get smaller? It depends on how it was saved

The quality the JPG was saved at is what predicts the result. A file saved at 90 or above has plenty to give up. A file saved near 75 or below does not. We generated one test scene, saved it at several qualities, and ran each file through this tool:

Generated locally; not a benchmark; not a guaranteed result. The test images are synthetic (smooth gradients with fine noise), not camera photos, so treat the direction as the lesson and not the numbers. The quality 60 file got bigger because re-saving at 75 stores more detail than that file had. A byte-for-byte size check before you delete the original takes five seconds and avoids that trap.

Compressing the same file again

We ran this tool's own output through it again five times. For our 1200 × 800 test image the size stayed at 113,699 bytes on every pass and the pixels did not change after the first pass. On smaller test images the size moved by less than 1% between passes. The file is already at quality 75 after the first pass, so a repeat gains nothing. A JPG from a camera, a phone or another program is a different case: the first pass re-quantises it, and every re-save in any program that re-encodes JPG loses a little more. Keep the original, compress once, and avoid chains of re-saves.

When the pixel count is the real problem

Compression lowers the bytes per pixel. It cannot help if the image simply has far more pixels than it will ever be shown at. We took a 3000 × 2000 JPG (581.0 KB) and compared two routes:

Generated locally; not a benchmark; not a guaranteed result. If your photo is 6000 pixels wide and it will sit in a 1200-pixel column, start with the image resizer. If you must keep every pixel, compress alone is the right route.

Photos, screenshots and scans

JPG compression is built for photographs and smooth gradients. Screenshots, charts and scans of text are the opposite case: sharp edges produce faint speckling around letters, and the PNG version is often smaller as well. In our test the same generated screenshot was 15.5 KB as a PNG and 85.5 KB as a JPG at quality 90. If that describes your image, the JPG vs PNG vs WebP guide explains which format to keep, and the PNG to JPG converter covers the other direction.

Accepts JPG/JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg), including progressive JPGs and grayscale JPGs. Output is a standard colour JPG at the same dimensions. PNG, WebP, GIF and other formats are not accepted here. Limits: 20 MB per file, 12,000 px per side and 40 megapixels. One file is compressed at a time.

1. Choose a JPG (up to 20 MB). The file is identified by its contents, so a PNG renamed to .jpg is rejected.
2. Click "Compress JPG".
3. Download the result, named after your original with "-compressed" added. Compare its size with the original before you delete anything.

• Getting a high-quality phone or camera photo under a form's upload limit
• Trimming a batch of web images that were exported at a very high quality setting
• Removing the camera, date and GPS fields from a photo as a side effect of re-saving it

Quality is fixed at 75 and cannot be changed, and there is no way to ask for a target file size. A JPG that was already saved at a similar or lower quality may come back the same size or larger. EXIF data, GPS data and embedded colour profiles are removed. A JPG that is cut off, for example from an interrupted download, is not always rejected: in our test the readable top part came back and the rest of the picture was filled with flat grey. Check the result before you rely on it.