About Image Compression

Compress images with quality settings and estimate savings. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Images collection.

Use Cases

• Compress product photos for an e-commerce site to reduce page weight and improve LCP.
• Batch-compress a directory of screenshots for inclusion in documentation.
• Convert PNG illustrations to WebP to reduce size without quality loss (WebP supports lossless).
• Optimize hero images for a landing page to reduce load time on mobile networks.

Tips

• Use WebP for web images — it's 25-35% smaller than equivalent-quality JPEG and 26% smaller than PNG, with broad browser support since 2022.
• Target 70-80% JPEG quality for most web images — quality differences below 80% are rarely visible to users, while file size reductions are significant.
• Enable progressive JPEG encoding for images above 30KB — progressive JPEGs appear to load faster because a low-quality preview renders before the full download completes.

Fun Facts

• JPEG was developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group and published as the ISO 10918-1 standard in 1994. Its lossy DCT compression reduced file sizes 10-20x vs. raw bitmap, making photo sharing on 1990s dial-up internet practical.
• Google's WebP format (2010) introduced lossy and lossless compression with better algorithms than JPEG and PNG. Its adoption was slow for 10 years due to Safari's lack of support; Apple added WebP in Safari 14 (2020).
• AVIF (AV1 Image File Format), standardized in 2019, offers 50% better compression than JPEG and 20% better than WebP. It's supported by Chrome (2020), Firefox (2021), and Safari 16 (2022), making it viable for new projects.

FAQ

Which output formats are available?

JPEG, PNG, WebP, and AVIF. WebP is the recommended default for most web images. AVIF offers better compression but has longer encoding time. PNG remains the right choice for screenshots and illustrations with flat colors.

Does it compress losslessly?

PNG and WebP (lossless mode) preserve all pixel data. JPEG and WebP (lossy) sacrifice some quality for smaller size. The quality slider controls the tradeoff — 100 is near-lossless, 60-80 is standard web quality.

Is processing done on the server or in the browser?

Compression runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly-compiled codecs. Images are not uploaded or stored. This also means processing speed depends on your device's CPU.