Camera and phone JPEGs are saved at 95–100% quality, which wastes megabytes. Re-encoding at 80% keeps the image visually identical on screen and cuts size by more than half. Set a target KB when a form demands "under 100 KB".
What is Compress JPEG?
Use this page to compress JPEG photos so they keep the same look but use a fraction of the space. Phones and cameras save JPGs at 95–100% quality, which is far more detail than any screen or social feed displays. Re-saving at around 80% usually cuts the file by more than half with no difference you can spot.
The tool takes JPG and JPEG files, lets you choose a quality level or a target size in KB, and gives you back JPEGs ready to share, upload or archive. You can also cap the longest side in pixels, which helps when a 12-megapixel photo only needs to fill a web page or an email.
How to compress JPEG
- Drop JPEG files.
- Pick quality or a target size.
- Download or ZIP.
How Compress JPEG works
A JPEG is not stored as a grid of pixel values. The encoder cuts the image into 8×8 pixel blocks and converts each block into a set of frequencies: broad smooth areas at one end, fine texture and sharp edges at the other. It then divides those numbers by a quantisation table and rounds them. High-frequency detail rounds to zero first, and zeros take almost no space.
The quality number simply scales that table. At 95% very little is rounded away; at 70% much more is. Because the eye is less sensitive to fine texture than to overall shape and tone, the lost detail is rarely noticed until quality drops a long way.
Each lossy save rounds the image again, so compress from the original once instead of re-saving the same JPEG many times. In this tool the decode and re-encode run in your browser, using its built-in JPEG encoder, and nothing is sent to a server.
Key features of Compress JPEG
Big JPEG batches, no charge
Compress one holiday snap or a folder of three hundred event photos in a single run, without paying or seeing a watermark. Batch mode processes them together and the ZIP button saves the whole set in one download.
Fine control over quality
Move the slider from 30% to 100% in single steps and see the new size on each file. Or switch to Target size and enter a KB limit: the tool finds the highest JPEG quality that fits, and only reduces pixels if that is unavoidable.
Fast local encoding
Your browser does the encoding directly, so you never wait for a file to travel to a server. Most photos finish in about a second, and you can start downloading the first results while the rest of a large batch is still processing on your device.
Works where your photos are
Open it on the phone that took the pictures, or on a laptop where they are backed up. It runs in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on every major system, and you can install it as an app from the browser menu.
Usable without a mouse
Tab through the controls, adjust the quality slider with the arrow keys and press Enter to run. Labels are read out by screen readers, progress is announced as files finish, and the page works with high zoom and dark mode.
Location data stripped
Phone JPEGs often carry GPS coordinates. By default those are removed during compression, and the photo itself never leaves your device. If you need the camera data kept for a photo archive, switch on Keep EXIF before you run it.
What makes EZ Compress's Compress JPEG different
Stays a JPEG
Some services quietly convert your photo to another format. Here the output is always a standard JPEG that opens anywhere, from old Windows viewers to email clients and government portals that refuse newer formats.
Max dimension in the same step
Set a longest side such as 2048 px and the tool resizes and compresses in one pass. That avoids saving a resized copy first and then compressing it again, which would round the image twice.
No server copy to worry about
Because the JPEGs are processed in your browser, there is no stored copy on someone else's machine and no deletion timer to trust. Close the tab and the work is gone.
Why use Compress JPEG?
JPEGs are the format most of us create every day, and they pile up fast. If you compress JPEG files before sharing them, uploads finish quickly on mobile data, inboxes stay under their limits, and backups take less space. A wedding album of 400 photos can drop from 2 GB to a few hundred MB.
It is also the right tool when a site asks for a smaller photo but still expects a JPG. Rather than converting to a format the site might reject, keep the same type and simply reduce the weight. Photographers can make web proofs while keeping the full-size originals for printing.
Who can use Compress JPEG?
Event photographers
Make lightweight JPEG proofs of a whole shoot for clients to review online, while the full-quality originals stay safely in the archive for print orders.
Estate agents
Shrink property photos taken on a phone or DSLR so listing pages load quickly and dozens of rooms can be uploaded without hitting size limits.
Travellers
Reduce a day's worth of phone photos before sending them home over hotel Wi-Fi or a roaming connection where every megabyte counts.
Teachers
Compress classroom and trip photos before adding them to newsletters, school websites or learning platforms that cap the size of each upload.
Settings explained
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mode | Choose between a fixed quality or an exact file-size target. |
| Quality | Higher keeps more detail but makes a larger file. 80–90% is visually identical to the original for most photos. |
| Target size (KB) | The tool finds the highest quality that fits under this size, downscaling only if it must. |
| Max dimension (px, 0 = keep) | Shrinks images whose longest side exceeds this, keeping aspect ratio. 0 keeps the original size. |
| Keep EXIF / location data | Off by default, so GPS and camera data are removed. Turn on to copy the date, camera details and location from a JPG or iPhone HEIC into the JPG output. |