How to Compress an Image for Free

With our online image compressor, you can quickly compress multiple photos without any loss in quality. It works swiftly and does not require any editing skills.

Compressing a photo is a crucial step you need to take prior to publishing it on the Internet. Image compression plays a key role in its optimization, since it allows you to reduce the size of your visual content dramatically and without a significant loss of quality. The difference between the original photo and the compressed copy tends to be practically unnoticeable to the naked eye. What’s more, this extremely simple process won’t take long. However, to achieve the best results and preserve the superb quality of your visual content, you need to know how to compress an image the right way.

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Compress Image Size In 3 Steps

Upload photos

Upload one or several images by dragging files directly from a folder to Watermarkly’s image compressor or click on "Select Images" and choose one of the following options: from your computer, Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, or web page.

If you want to import images from either of the cloud storages, you will need to grant access to your account first. Please note that our online image compressor supports images in 3 formats: JPG, PNG, and GIF.

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Choose the quality you need

The photo compressor offers three options for compressing the size of an image:

  • Better Quality – choose this option if preserving excellent quality is a priority for you.
  • Smaller Size - go for this option if compressing your photos dramatically is your main goal.
  • Specific File Size - this option is ideal if you need to compress images to a certain number of kilobytes and have more control over the final results of image compression.
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Export your compressed images

Click on “Compress Images”. If you choose the Better Quality or Smaller Size option, you will see the size of your compressed images in bytes after the process is finished.

Download them to your device or a cloud storage account. Our image compressor does everything in its power to keep the quality of your compressed photos at the level of the originals yet reduce their size from megabytes to kilobytes.

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How to compress an image with Watermarkly

You can compress photos with and without loss of quality. This solely depends on the type of compression. There are two of them – lossy and lossless. It’s also worth mentioning that one image format can support only one type of image compression, but not the other. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Lossy compression is supported by JPEG

When you compress photos in JPEG format , some redundant data is removed. This type of compression is called lossy because some loss of quality occurs no matter what. For this reason, if you apply really strong compression to your images, their quality will degrade drastically. But if you compress images the right way, you won’t see much of a difference between the original and the compressed copy. Lossy compression can reduce the file size of an image by a lot.

Lossy compression uses the imperfection of the human eye to its advantage. You may not know this, but people pay more attention to the contrast between brightness and darkness than to the contrast between colors and nuanced hues. The way lossy compression works is it gets rid of similar-looking colors and some finer details but doesn’t change bright and dark spots. For this reason, you won’t see much of a difference in quality.

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Lossless compression is supported by PNG and GIF

There is no loss or degradation of quality in lossless image compression. When you compress photos this way, no redundant data is removed. The image is simply compressed; kind of like a zip-archive. Which is why, when lossless compression occurs, the file size of an image won’t be significantly reduced.

Lossless compression is a fully reversible process, which means that you can restore your compressed images to their initial state, which is impossible with lossy compression.

PNG is a format that is commonly used for digital graphics – logos, icons, images with a lot of text, etc. PNG images cannot be compressed to the same size as JPEGs – they will always be bigger.

GIF is used for files with animation. Even though it's a lossless format, GIFs are usually of more manageable size.

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Benefits of Watermarkly’s Image Compressor

Thousands of people choose our photo compressor, because it allows them to compress photos on their computer, tablet, or smartphone. If you don’t want to waste your time searching for editing software to compress just one or several photos, you can use our app, too!

Easy to use

You don’t need to have any editing skills or understand minor aspects of photo compression. Watermarkly’s picture compressor knows what to do with your photos. Your job is simple - import your images and choose one of the compression options. With our online image compressor, you will be able to compress an image on Mac, Windows or any other operational system. It can also work on a smartphone. No matter if you have an iPhone or a device with Android OS, you can easily compress your photos anywhere you are – as long as you have Internet access.

Completely safe

Our compress image tool processes your files right in your browser. They will never reach our servers or get stored on them. We won’t have access to your images. They will always remain yours. There is no risk of unknowingly downloading a malicious file, no need to waste time installing any software.

Different image formats

You can compress photos of different formats at the same time. There’s no need to process your images separately. You can upload all of them into our photo compressor as one batch. Even if you import hundreds of images, our app will take mere minutes to compress them.

Free access and ad-free experience

Watermarkly’s compress image tool is free for every visitor. You can use it without any cost or limitations. We value your browsing experience, which is why we ensure that you won't be bothered by annoying pop-ups or intrusive banners while using our picture compressor.

Additionally, there's no requirement for you to create an account, provide your email address or phone number. You can start compressing your photos immediately without the need to install any software. Simply upload your photos and begin compressing right away.

More than just an image compressor

Watermarkly’s photo compressor provides a range of online tools that allows you to:

When you purchase the paid version of our image compressor, you gain access to all these tools, allowing you to utilize them simultaneously. This offers you a versatile and efficient solution for all your photo editing needs.

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Compress Image Size. Key Information

Before we dive into how to compress a photo, let’s cover some basics. Any file, including an image, has a size. A file size is measured in megabytes and kilobytes. There are 1024 kilobytes in 1 megabyte.

A size of an image depends on various factors:

  • Pixel dimensions. Your photos are composed of pixels. The bigger the number of pixels, the bigger will be the size of your image in megabytes. For example, a JPEG image with the pixel dimensions of 6000x4000 may have a size of around 10 MBs. If 150 pixels are removed from this image, then its size will be reduced by around 75 kilobytes.
  • Quality and details.The file size of your image is also determined by its quality. If your high-resolution photo has a lot of details and colors in it, it will be of a bigger size.
  • Format. More common formats like JPEG and GIF will produce images of more manageable size than any of the raw formats. That’s because raw photos contain a lot more information.
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Why You Should Compress Photos for Your Website?

You should compress images to optimize your visual content for the web. Thus, you’ll be able to substantially reduce the size of an image without compromising its excellent quality.

Image compression can be a great solution to several problems. First and foremost, you should never post high-resolution photos of a large size on your website, because they will take a long time to load and subsequently, slow down the loading speed of the entire webpage. People hate it when they have to wait for all the visual content to show up. If your website doesn’t load quickly, your visitors will go to your competitors, and you will lose your potential customers.

However, the smaller the file size of your images, the less space they will occupy on the server and the faster they will load. Therefore, it is essential to compress photos before publishing them on your website if you don’t want to keep your visitors waiting.

If you don’t compress images before posting them online, you may encounter either of these issues:

  • Webpages will take longer than three seconds to load, which will cause a lot of people to leave. This might lead to a drop in conversion rate of your website. Even if visitors have a strong internet connection, the large-sized images on your website won’t load fast enough. And if a person tries to open your website on their smartphone while using their mobile internet, it will be a nightmare – your website will load with the speed of a snail!
  • Your website might “eat” your visitors’ traffic. Usually, loading webpages with large-sized photos can use up quite a lot of internet traffic. As a result, your visitors will lose their precious bytes just to load your website at an excruciatingly slow speed. In other words, they will get a bad customer experience.

You can also compress photos to:

  • Free up space in the memory storage of a mobile phone, tablet, or computer.
  • Reduce image size to send them by email, or upload them to social networks.
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FAQs

How to compress an image online?

You can compress images in Watermarkly’s online image compressor. The process is extremely simple. You need to import your photos, choose one of three options – Best Quality, Smaller Size, Specific File Size – and click on “Compress Images”. That’s it! No matter what option you’ll choose, our app will keep the quality of your compressed files as close to the original as possible.

How to compress an image without losing quality?

This is pretty much impossible, if you want to compress a photo in lossy format. In lossy compression, removal of some redundant data and insignificant loss of quality is inevitable. However, this isn’t something that you should be worried about. If compression isn’t strong, you won’t see any difference between the original photo and the compressed copy. One thing to keep in mind, though, is if you want to achieve the best results, you will need to use a photo compressor that allows you to preserve the best quality when compressing. Fortunately, Watermark’s compress photo tool has this feature.

How to compress a photo on an iPhone?

Watermark’s picture compressor will come to your rescue here as well. You won’t have to download any mobile apps to compress your photos on iPhone or Android. Our website has a great mobile version, which means you can use our online tools in your mobile browser. The process of compressing images is the same as in the desktop version – upload your photos, choose the level of compression that you want, and download your compressed copies.

How to compress a photo on Mac?

If you have a Windows computer of any version or MAC, you can use our app to compress a photo. It works online and doesn’t need to be installed. The photo compressor processes your images right in your browser. Once the compression process is done you can download your photos to your computer or one of the cloud storages.

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Compress Photos in a Few Minutes with Watermarkly

Now, you know why you might need to compress an image and how to do it easily on our website. If you need to optimize your photos for the web quickly, open Watermarkly’s image compressor and get to work. All the tools and features are available for free and online. If you want to compress more than 10 photos in one go and get rid of a few other limitations in working with images on our website, consider purchasing one of our two paid editions.

With Watermarkly, you will get compressed images that are of smaller size yet have outstanding quality. You won’t have to waste your precious time installing any software on your computer or downloading an app to your phone. With us, compressing your images for the web will be effortless, efficient and quick.

Compress Image Online