Start with the job, not the file size
Most people land here with one of three problems. A photo is too heavy to upload. A portal has rejected it for being over a size limit. Or an image is the wrong shape for where it needs to go. The tools on this page cover all three, and they are free to use in your browser, with no account and no upload to a server.
Which image tool should you use?
If you just need a smaller file and do not care about the exact number, start with the general Image Compressor for everyday photos. It is the sensible default for website images, email attachments and growing photo libraries.
Format matters when the image has a job to do. Use Compress JPG Online for photographs when the image is a photo — JPG compression is lossy, which suits photos well because the eye forgives a lot in a busy scene. Use Compress PNG Online while keeping transparency for logos, icons and screenshots with transparent backgrounds, where that transparency has to survive.
When a form gives you a hard limit, go straight to the exact target: Compress Image to 50KB, Compress Image to 100KB or Compress Image to 200KB. Exam, visa and job portals work this way, and guessing gets old fast.
Two tools get confused with each other. The Image Resizer to change pixel dimensions makes the whole picture smaller or larger. The Image Cropper to reframe a photo cuts part of it away to change the framing or aspect ratio. If your subject is off-centre, crop. If the picture is simply too big, resize.
A workflow that handles most photos
For a portal application photo, the order that works is: crop to the required shape first, resize to the required dimensions second, then compress to the KB target last. Compressing first and cropping afterwards just means doing the compression twice.
Before you share a photo publicly, check it with the Image Metadata Viewer to check EXIF data. Phone photos can carry the GPS location where they were taken. If you do not want that public, run the file through Remove EXIF Data before sharing a photo. If the image is your work, add your mark with the Image Watermark tool for your own photos before it goes out.
Three small things worth knowing
Screenshots of text are not documents. If you need the words out of a screenshot or a scanned page, the Image to Text OCR tool to pull text from a picture reads the image and gives you editable text. Website owners have one extra job: the Favicon Generator for browser tab icons turns a logo into the small icon that shows in a browser tab, and the Background Remover for clean product shots is the quickest route to a plain background for a listing photo.