Image compressor

Why "nothing is uploaded" is the point here

Think about what people actually put through an image compressor. A scan of a passport for a visa application. A photograph of a CNIC for a bank form. A signed contract. Pictures of their children. The tool asks for an image, and that is the image they have to hand.

Every popular free compressor sends that file to a server, processes it there, and sends it back. Their privacy policy will say it is deleted after an hour, and it probably is. But you have handed a stranger's computer a copy of your passport to save 200 kilobytes, and you cannot check what happened to it.

This one reads the file with your own browser, draws it onto a canvas and re-encodes it there. That claim is testable and you should test it rather than believe it — so here is exactly what you will find. Open your developer tools, go to the network tab, and compress something.

You will see one external request when the page first opens: the analytics script this site loads, the same as almost every site you visit. Then nothing. Pick an image, resize it, change the quality, download it — not one request fires, because there is no server behind this page for a request to go to. Your picture is never part of anything that leaves the machine.

It removes the location your camera recorded

A photograph from a phone carries an EXIF block, and that block routinely holds the exact GPS coordinates of where it was taken, along with the time, the device and sometimes the owner's name. Post the picture and you have posted your house.

Re-encoding writes a new file from the pixels alone, so EXIF does not survive. That is a side effect of how this works rather than a feature that had to be built, and it is the right default for anything going onto the internet. The one EXIF field that is read first is the rotation tag, because ignoring it is what makes portrait phone photographs come out on their side.

Choosing the settings

Quality

For photographs on a website, 75 to 85 is the range worth using — at normal viewing size the difference from the original is hard to find. Below about 60, JPEG artefacts start to show as smearing around sharp edges and any text in the image. Quality has no effect on PNG, which is lossless; there, the saving comes from resizing.

Longest side

This is usually where the real saving is. A modern phone takes a 4000-pixel photograph; a full-width image on a website is displayed at about 1600. You are sending four times the pixels anybody will ever see. Resizing to 1920 is invisible on screen and often cuts the file by three quarters before any quality setting is applied.

Format

• WebP — typically 25 to 35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality, supported by every current browser. The right choice for a website.
• JPEG — when the file has to be opened by older software, attached to a government form, or handled by someone whose tools you cannot predict.
• PNG — lossless, and the right choice for logos, screenshots, diagrams and anything with text or flat colour. Wrong for photographs, where it is often several times larger than JPEG.

When compression makes the file bigger

It happens, and it is not a fault. Re-encoding an already well-compressed JPEG at high quality adds bytes instead of removing them, and turning a photograph into a PNG usually doubles it or worse.

Most tools show you the new size and say nothing about it. This one compares the two, tells you plainly, and downloads your original untouched instead of handing you a worse file with a smaller-sounding name. If you need it smaller than that, lower the quality, reduce the longest side, or switch to WebP.

Questions

Is there a watermark or a limit?

No watermark, no sign-up, no daily cap. Twenty images at a time and 30 MB each, which are limits of what a browser tab can comfortably hold rather than a paywall.

Does it work offline?

Once the page has loaded, yes — there is nothing left for it to fetch.

What about HEIC from an iPhone?

Not supported, because browsers cannot decode HEIC. Set your iPhone to "Most Compatible" under Settings → Camera → Formats and it will produce JPEGs instead, or share the photo through an app that converts on the way out.

Will it upscale a small image?

No. The longest-side setting only ever shrinks. Enlarging a small image does not add detail that was never captured — it just makes a bigger, softer file.

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All free, all running entirely in your browser. Built by Maxverse Lab, a software studio in Karachi.