JPEG Compressor

Compress JPEG Online — Free, No Watermark

To compress a JPEG, upload your photo, lower the Image Quality to about 75–80% (visually transparent for most photos), optionally resize down to your display dimensions, and click Compress. Everything runs on our servers — no install — and files auto-delete after a few hours.

Real result: in our production data the median JPEG drops ~74% (a 2 MB photo → ~0.5 MB) at quality 75–80%, which is near-indistinguishable from the original.

How to Compress JPEG Images Online

1. Upload Your JPEGs: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Image Files" to load your photos. Batch upload is supported — .jpg, .jpeg, and .jfif all work, and files are uploaded over an encrypted connection and auto-deleted after a few hours.
2. Pick a Compression Method: Choose Target file size (%) to shrink each file to a share of its current size (e.g., 60% turns a 5 MB photo into ~3 MB), Specific file size to hit an exact KB/MB target (great for the 200 KB hero-image rule on web), or Image Quality (%) to dial in the JPEG quality factor directly — 80–85 is the documented sweet spot for web photos.
3. Set Auto Scale (Optional): Leave Auto Scale on (default) to let the encoder downsize dimensions when quality alone can't hit your target — useful for 24 MP camera output that's overkill at 1200 px screen width. Turn it off if you need to preserve original pixel dimensions.
4. Compress and Download: Click "Compress" and grab each file individually or as a ZIP. No sign-up, no watermark, no email gating.

Why Compress JPEG Files?

A modern phone camera produces 3–10 MB JPEGs at 12–48 MP — overkill for a website, an email, or a chat attachment. Compressing routinely cuts file size by 60–90% with no perceptible quality loss for the intended use, especially when the display target is smaller than the camera's native resolution. Typical scenarios:

• Web page speed and Core Web Vitals — Google's "good" LCP threshold is 2.5 seconds, and the hero image is almost always the LCP element on a product page. A 4 MB original at Q95 dropped to 250 KB at Q82 cuts LCP by 1–2 seconds on a 4G connection without visible degradation.
• Email attachment caps — Personal Gmail caps attachments at 25 MB (effectively ~18 MB after MIME encoding overhead), and most corporate Exchange/Outlook tenants default to 20 MB. A vacation album of fifteen 6 MB JPEGs blows past that; compressing to Q80 puts the same album under 10 MB.
• Social media uploads — Instagram re-compresses anything you upload anyway. Pre-compressing to roughly 1080–1440 px at Q85 means you control the trade-off instead of Instagram's encoder, and the upload finishes faster.
• Cloud storage and iCloud bills — A 30 GB photo library re-compressed at Q82 with Auto Scale typically lands around 8–12 GB. That can keep you on a free tier (iCloud 5 GB, Google Drive 15 GB) or one tier lower on paid storage.
• Print-to-web handoffs — Print masters at Q95–100 are wasteful for the web preview. Compressing the web-deliverable separately at Q80 keeps both versions clean instead of degrading the master.
• Document scans and screenshots — Receipts, whiteboard photos, and screenshots saved as JPEG often weigh 2–4 MB for content that compresses cleanly to 200–400 KB at Q75.

Working with a different source first? Convert HEIC to JPG from iPhone photos or PNG to JPG for screenshots before compressing, and use Resize JPG if you need precise pixel dimensions rather than auto-scaling.

JPEG Quality Cheat Sheet — Which Setting to Pick

Quality is the JPEG quantization factor exposed on a 0–100 scale. Higher means larger files and more retained detail; the perceptual curve is steep above ~90 and shallow below ~70.

The 85 vs 95 gap is the most lopsided trade in the format: roughly 50–60% smaller files for changes most viewers can't see at arm's length.

JPEG vs WebP vs AVIF — Modern Web Image Formats

JPEG isn't the densest format anymore, but it's the most universally supported. Compare what you'd save in modern formats — but only if your audience's browsers support them.

In practice, ship JPEG as the <picture> fallback and serve WebP or AVIF to browsers that support them — that's the highest-impact image optimization you can do without breaking older clients.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I reduce JPEG file size?

Lower the Image Quality slider to 75–80% — that range is visually transparent on natural photos while cutting most of the bytes — and resize the image down to the dimensions it's actually displayed at. Re-saving an already-low-quality JPEG won't help much, since that detail is already gone.

What JPEG quality should I use for web images?

Quality 80–85 is the documented sweet spot. The perceptual gap between Q85 and Q95 is invisible to most viewers at normal monitor distance, but the Q85 file is roughly 50–60% smaller. Above Q90 you're paying for bits no one sees; below Q70 you start to see 8×8 block artefacts on flat areas like skies and skin. If your tool only offers presets, "High" usually maps to Q80–85 — that's the right default.

Why is my compressed JPEG still huge?

Three usual suspects. (1) Your source is enormous — a 48 MP photo at Q80 is still ~2 MB. Turn on Auto Scale or compress with the file-size target instead of pure quality. (2) Your source is already compressed — re-compressing a Q85 JPEG to Q85 saves almost nothing because the data is already gone. (3) The image is full of fine detail (foliage, textured fabric, grainy night shots), which legitimately needs more bits than a smooth portrait at the same quality.

Does re-compressing a JPEG hurt quality (generation loss)?

Yes. JPEG is lossy, so every save discards more high-frequency detail and the 8×8 block grid drifts slightly each time, compounding artefacts. One re-encode at a slightly lower quality is usually fine. Three or four passes show visible degradation. If you have the original RAW, HEIC, or PNG, compress from that source rather than from an existing JPEG.

What's the difference between.jpg and.jpeg?

Nothing — they're the same format and the same file. The .jpg extension exists because older Windows versions limited extensions to three characters; Unix-family systems never had that limit so .jpeg was common there. Both .jpg and .jpeg use the JPEG/JFIF compression standardized in ITU-T T.81 (1992). XConvert accepts .jpg, .jpeg, and .jfif interchangeably.

Should I use progressive or baseline JPEG?

Progressive renders the whole image at low quality first, then refines in 3–5 scans; baseline draws top-to-bottom in a single pass. For images above ~10 KB, progressive files are typically 2–10% smaller AND give users the "instant blurry preview" loading experience. Below 10 KB the multi-scan overhead can make progressive slightly larger, so baseline wins. Modern browsers handle both fine — there's no compatibility reason to prefer baseline.

Can I compress to an exact file size like 100 KB or 200 KB?

Yes. Pick Specific file size, enter your target in KB or MB, and the encoder iterates on quality (and, if Auto Scale is on, dimensions) until it lands at or just under your target. This is the right mode when a CMS or job board enforces a hard cap — "upload must be under 200 KB" needs a target, not a quality slider you have to guess at.

What about chroma subsampling — should I worry about 4:2:0 vs 4:4:4?

For natural photos at web sizes, 4:2:0 (default for JPEG) cuts file size by roughly 15–20% with no visible quality loss because the human eye resolves luma far better than chroma. 4:4:4 only matters for synthetic content with saturated edges — red text on blue background, UI screenshots, or charts — where 4:2:0 produces faint colour fringing. For camera photos, 4:2:0 is always the right choice; for screenshots-as-JPEG, consider PNG or WebP lossless instead.

Will compression strip my photo's EXIF data (camera, GPS, date)?

Most online compressors strip non-essential EXIF to save bytes, but XConvert preserves what it can during JPEG re-encoding. If privacy matters (GPS coordinates on photos you share publicly), strip EXIF deliberately with an EXIF tool before sharing rather than relying on a compressor's behaviour. Note that orientation is preserved either way — your portrait-mode shots won't flip sideways.

Is anything uploaded to your servers?

processing happens on our servers and files are deleted automatically after a few hours. There's no account requirement, no watermark, and no file-count limit gating the compressor. Free users can compress JPEGs up to 300 MB each — more than enough for any camera JPEG (typical 48 MP raw-quality JPEG is 10–25 MB).