Compress JPEG Photos Without Losing Detail

JPEG is the format almost every camera and phone uses for photos, and it's a lossy format by design — it throws away some detail to keep file sizes manageable, and you can control exactly how much with a quality setting.

Lowering the quality setting compresses a JPEG further, trading a bit of fine detail (especially in busy areas like foliage or fabric texture) for a smaller file. Because JPEG compression is lossy, re-saving an already-compressed JPEG at a lower quality repeatedly can gradually introduce blocky artifacts — Downscale Image compresses from your original each time, so you get a clean result in one pass.

For photos you plan to print or archive, keep the original camera metadata — date, location, camera model — by turning on "Keep metadata" before downloading. For photos going on the web or into a form, leaving metadata off keeps things private and shaves off a little extra size.

Everything happens on your device. Your photos, including any personal or location data attached to them, are never sent to a server.

Here's how to shrink a JPEG photo without leaving your browser:

1. Upload your image
   Drag and drop an image, or select one or more files from your phone or computer.

2. Drag the quality slider
   Watch the live before/after preview and stop wherever the size/quality tradeoff looks right.

3. Decide on metadata
   Leave metadata stripped for privacy and a smaller file, or switch on "Keep metadata" if you want to preserve the original date, location, and camera info.

4. Download
   Save the compressed JPEG, or download the whole batch as a zip.

Everything runs locally in your browser — your images never leave your device, so there's nothing to wait on and nothing to worry about.

Need to fit under a strict size limit, like a job application asking for a photo under 100 KB? Switch the compression control to File size instead of guessing with the quality slider.