A large photo slows down a web page, bounces off an email size limit, or eats storage on your phone — but compress it too aggressively and you lose visible quality. Here’s how to strike the balance.
Why quality doesn’t drop linearly
JPEG compression works by discarding detail the human eye is least likely to notice. Between roughly 70–85% quality, file size drops sharply while visible quality barely changes. Below about 30% quality, blocky artifacts become obvious, especially around sharp edges and text.
A practical starting point
- Photos for a website or social post: 65–75% quality is usually indistinguishable from the original at a fraction of the size
- Photos you may print or zoom into: stay closer to 85–90%
- Scanned documents or text-heavy images: consider converting to PDF instead, since PNG/JPEG compression handles text edges poorly
Why in-browser compression is worth using
Tools that compress your image using your browser’s own canvas — rather than uploading it to a server first — are both faster and more private, since the original file never leaves your device.
Try it with the free Image Compressor — pick a quality level and download the result instantly. For scanned pages, see JPG to PDF; to pull text out of a photo, see Image to Text.