Compress JPEG images online.

What does this JPEG compressor do?

This tool compresses JPEG images using Mozilla's mozJPEG encoder — the same technology that powers Firefox's image rendering. JPEG is ideal for photographs and complex images with smooth gradients, like portraits, landscapes, and product shots. The format achieves small file sizes by discarding colour information that the human eye struggles to perceive. Our compressor gives you full control over this trade-off between file size and visual quality.

A typical 8-megapixel JPEG photo from a modern smartphone is 4-6 MB. Compressed at quality 80, the same image becomes 200-600 KB — a 90% reduction — with no visible difference at normal viewing distances. For websites, this means dramatically faster load times, lower bandwidth costs, and better Core Web Vitals scores.

When to use JPEG compression

JPEG is the default format for photographs, magazine-quality images, and any visual that needs smooth colour transitions. If you are building an e-commerce site, a photography portfolio, or a news article with embedded photos, JPEG is almost always the right choice. Compress your JPEGs before uploading to save bandwidth without sacrificing the visual fidelity your audience expects.

JPEG is not ideal for images with sharp edges, text overlays, or transparency. For screenshots, logos, and icons, our PNG compressor is a better fit. If you need the smallest possible file size for modern browsers, consider WebP or AVIF, which can shrink files even further at equivalent quality.

Benefits of compressing JPEG images

Faster page loads: Compressed JPEGs load 4-10x faster, improving user experience and SEO rankings. Lower storage costs: A 90% reduction in file size means you store 10x more images in the same space. Reduced bandwidth: Serving smaller files cuts CDN bills and data transfer costs. Better Core Web Vitals: Google's Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric rewards fast-loading images, directly boosting search rankings.

Supported formats

Our compressor accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, SVG, HEIC, and TIFF as input. Output is optimized JPEG. All processing happens in your browser — no files are ever uploaded to a server.

Privacy and speed

Every compression runs locally via WebAssembly. Your images never touch a server, our CDN, or any third party. Processing is parallelized across all available CPU cores — a batch of 50 images completes in seconds, not minutes. There are no file size limits beyond your device's memory.

Tips for best JPEG compression results

Start with quality 80 — it offers the best balance of file size and visual quality. Use target-size mode when you need to hit a specific file size (e.g., 500 KB for an email attachment). Enable progressive JPEG for images that load gradually on slow connections. Strip metadata with Lossless mode to remove EXIF data like GPS coordinates and camera settings. For batch jobs, use our bulk compressor to process hundreds of images in parallel.

The real-world savings add up fast. A photography portfolio with 50 full-resolution JPEGs at 5 MB each totals 250 MB. Compressing each to 500 KB with no visible quality loss brings that down to 25 MB — a 10x reduction that turns a sluggish gallery into a snappy one. An e-commerce catalogue with 1,000 product images at 2 MB each drops from 2 GB to roughly 200 MB. For email marketing, reducing a hero image from 1.5 MB to 300 KB means it renders instantly instead of showing a broken placeholder while the recipient waits. Social media managers compressing batches of 30–50 images before uploading can cut monthly bandwidth from several gigabytes to a few hundred megabytes, keeping team workflows fast and cloud storage bills low.

JPEG handles different kinds of images in very different ways. High-detail photographs — landscapes with foliage, cityscapes with brickwork, or macro shots with fine texture — benefit most from quality settings of 85–95, where the encoder preserves the high-frequency detail the eye expects. Smooth-gradient images like portraits, skies, or product shots on seamless backgrounds compress extremely well at quality 60–75 because large areas of similar colour are aggressively encoded with no visible difference. The one weak spot: sharp edges and high-contrast text. JPEG's 8×8 block-based compression introduces visible ringing and blocking artefacts around text overlays, logos, and screenshots, which is why those are better served by PNG's lossless approach. Understanding your image type lets you choose the right quality setting instead of blindly using a single preset for everything.

JPEG files almost always carry hidden metadata. EXIF data stored by your camera or phone includes the make and model, lens and focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, flash settings, and often GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. There is also IPTC and XMP metadata for captions, keywords, copyright, and author information. A single raw image from a DSLR may contain 50–100 KB of metadata — that is 5–10 % of an already-compressed JPEG. Our compressor's Lossless mode strips all of this automatically, which is useful for privacy (removing location data before sharing online) and for saving every last kilobyte. You can also choose to preserve metadata for copyright and author credits if your workflow requires it. Either way, being aware of what is hidden inside your JPEGs helps you make intentional decisions about privacy, storage, and image provenance.

How to compress a JPEG — step by step

1. Drop your image. Drag a JPEG onto the upload area or click to browse. 2. Choose your quality. Use the slider or enable target-size mode. 3. Preview. Drag the comparison slider to check the result. 4. Download. Save individual files or everything as a ZIP.

Need to resize your images before compressing? Try our image resizer tool. Want to convert JPEGs to another format? Use the image converter.