The fastest way to make an image smaller without it looking worse: convert it to WebP (or AVIF) at around 80% quality. For most photos that alone cuts the file by 60–80% and you won't see the difference at normal viewing size.

That's the short answer. Here's the rest of it.

Quality is not the only lever

People reach straight for the "quality" slider, but three things decide the final size:

  • Format. JPEG is fine, WebP is ~25–35% smaller at the same quality, AVIF smaller still. Switching format usually beats squeezing quality.
  • Dimensions. A 6000×4000 phone photo displayed at 1200px wide is carrying 4× the pixels it needs. Resizing down is the single biggest win people skip.
  • Quality. Useful for the last bit, but past a point you're just adding artifacts, not saving meaningful bytes.

So the order that works: resize to the size you'll actually display → pick WebP/AVIF → then nudge quality.

Do it in the browser (nothing uploaded)

  1. Open the Image Compression tool and drop your image in.
  2. Set the output format to WebP. Leave quality around 75–85%.
  3. If it's a huge photo, set a target width (e.g. 1600px for web).
  4. Compare the before/after with the slider — if you can't tell them apart, you're done.

A real example: a 9.0 MB PNG screenshot came out to 1.2 MB as WebP at 80%, zoomed in side by side and the text was still crisp. That's the kind of ratio to aim for.

When NOT to use WebP

  • You need a logo or icon with hard edges and few colors — that's a job for SVG, not WebP. Vectorize it instead.
  • The image is going somewhere that doesn't support WebP (rare now, but some old email clients). Keep JPEG there.
  • It's already a small, optimized JPEG — re-compressing can make it bigger or fuzzier. Check the before/after; if it didn't shrink, keep the original.

A note on privacy

Everything above happens locally in your browser — the file never leaves your device. For personal photos, screenshots with sensitive info, or client work under NDA, that matters more than a few saved kilobytes.

Ready to try it? Drop an image into the Image Compression tool and see the before/after for yourself.