Compress photos to fit any file size limit

Phone photos are four to six megabytes each. Most upload forms will not take them. Drop yours in and get a photo that fits, that still looks like the photo.

Why your photos are too big to send

A photo from a recent phone is somewhere between three and six megabytes. A photo from a real camera can be fifteen or more. That is not a mistake, and it is not the phone being wasteful. The camera does not know whether you are going to print the picture at poster size or attach it to an email, so it keeps everything, and it saves at a quality setting far above what anybody can see on a screen.

Then you meet a limit. Gmail stops at 25 MB per message, so about five photos. A job application wants your ID under 2 MB. A rental form, a school portal, a visa application, a warranty claim, an insurance photo, an eBay listing: every one of them has a number, the number is usually small, and none of them explain what to do about it. That is the entire reason this page exists.

Photo, picture, pic, whatever you call it, the problem is the same: the file is bigger than the form will take, and this page fixes that.

What you can expect to get back

A photograph straight off a phone typically comes back 60 to 80 percent smaller with no difference you can see at normal viewing size. A 4.5 MB photo becomes something around 900 KB. Five of them now fit comfortably in one email, with room to spare.

If you need to hit a specific number, use the quality slider. Quality 80, the default, is what most of the web treats as visually lossless for photographs. Pull it to 60 and the file roughly halves again, and on most photos you still will not see it. Below about 50 you will start to notice softness in skies and skin. The before and after sizes are shown for every file, so you can find the setting that clears the limit and stop there.

Moving the slider does not re-upload the photo and does not use another image from your monthly allowance. Try three settings, pick the one that fits, and download that one.

Your photos carry your location, and we remove it

This is the part almost nobody mentions. Every photo your phone takes has metadata attached to it, and on default settings that metadata includes the GPS coordinates of the place it was taken, accurate to a few metres. It also includes the exact date and time, the phone model, and often a small preview image of the original.

That means a photo of something for sale, uploaded to a marketplace listing, can tell a stranger the address of the house it was photographed in. It is a real problem and it has caused real harm.

Every photo compressed here has its metadata stripped by default. Not as an option you have to find. The coordinates, the timestamp, the camera details, and the embedded thumbnail all come off. What you download is the picture and nothing else.

Which format to keep, and when to change it

Keep the photo as a JPG, which is what this page does unless you tell it otherwise. JPG is what upload forms expect, what email clients preview, and what every piece of software on earth can open. If a form says it accepts JPG or PNG, it means JPG.

Change the format only when the destination is a web page you control. In that case WebP is typically another 25 to 35 percent smaller than the JPG at the same visual quality, and AVIF is smaller still. Both are supported by every current browser. Neither is a good choice for something you are attaching to an email or handing to a government website.

One thing not to do: do not save a photograph as a PNG. PNG stores every pixel exactly, which is the right behaviour for a logo or a screenshot and the wrong behaviour for a photograph. A photo saved as PNG is routinely five to ten times larger than the same photo as a JPG that nobody could tell apart.

Compressing a batch of photos at once

Drop the whole folder in. Up to 30 photos at a time on the free tier, each up to 25 MB, and one button downloads all the results as a single ZIP. That is usually the fastest way to deal with a holiday's worth of pictures before emailing them, or a set of product shots before a listing goes up.

If the photos are for a web page rather than an email, resize them before you compress them. An image displayed 800 pixels wide does not need to be 4000 pixels wide, and exporting it at 1600 pixels first will save you more than any compressor can. Compression and resizing solve different halves of the same problem.

Photo compression questions

How do I compress a photo to under 2 MB?

Drop the photo in and leave the format as JPG. Most phone photos land well under 2 MB at the default quality of 80. If yours does not, pull the quality slider down until the after size shown on the card is under the limit. Quality 60 roughly halves the file again and is still hard to tell apart from the original on a screen. Changing the quality costs you nothing, so adjust it until it fits.

Will compressing a photo make it look worse?

Not at the default settings, on a normal photograph, viewed at normal size. JPEG compression discards detail your eye is unlikely to miss, and quality 80 is the level most of the web treats as visually lossless. If you are printing the photo, or you plan to crop deeply into it later, keep your original. Compression cannot be undone.

Does this remove the location data from my photos?

Yes, by default and without you having to ask. GPS coordinates, the capture timestamp, the camera or phone model, and any embedded preview thumbnail are all stripped from every photo. This matters most for photos you are about to post publicly, because the coordinates in an unmodified phone photo can identify the address it was taken at.

Can I compress photos on my phone?

Yes. The tool runs in the browser, so it works on a phone the same way it works on a laptop, and there is nothing to install. Tap the dropzone, pick photos from your camera roll, and download the compressed versions.

Is it free, and do I have to sign up?

It is free and there is no signup. Free use allows photos up to 25 MB each and 30 at a time. A free account adds a monthly allowance of 100 images and a dashboard showing what you have used. Nothing is watermarked and nothing is held back.