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Large photos slow down websites, bounce off email attachment limits and get rejected by job, visa and exam portals that cap uploads at 100 KB or 200 KB. The PDFWix image compressor re-encodes each photo in your browser at the quality you choose, optionally scales it down, and can step quality down automatically until the file fits a target size. A typical 4 MB phone photo drops to 300–600 KB with no visible difference on screen.
Large photos slow down websites, bounce off email attachment limits and get rejected by job, visa and exam portals that cap uploads at 100 KB or 200 KB. The PDFWix image compressor re-encodes each photo in your browser at the quality you choose, optionally scales it down, and can step quality down automatically until the file fits a target size. A typical 4 MB phone photo drops to 300–600 KB with no visible difference on screen.
| Method | Keeps visual quality | Hits an exact KB target | Files uploaded | Batch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDFWix Compress Image | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✗ Never | ✓ Yes |
| Screenshot the photo | ✗ Often blurry | ✗ No | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Desktop photo editor export | ✓ Yes | Manual trial and error | ✗ No | Depends |
| Typical upload-based compressor | ✓ Yes | Sometimes | ✓ Yes, to a server | Often limited |
How the common approaches to shrinking a photo compare.
To compress an image free: open PDFWix Compress Image, drop in your JPG, PNG or WebP photos, pick a quality (75% is a good balance) or type a target size such as 100 KB, then click Compress images. The smaller files download straight away and your originals are left untouched.
PDFWix Compress Image uses the browser's native canvas encoder (HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob) to re-encode JPG and WebP images at a chosen quality between 30% and 95%. PNG files are re-encoded as WebP, which supports transparency and lossy compression, because PNG itself has no quality setting. When a target size is set, quality is lowered in 8-point steps until the output fits. Files are never uploaded to a server.
A digital photo is a grid of pixels. Formats like JPG and WebP store that grid using lossy compression: they throw away fine detail the human eye barely notices — tiny colour shifts inside flat areas, noise in shadows — and keep the edges and textures we do see. The quality setting controls how aggressive that trade-off is. Between 70% and 85% most photos look identical to the original at normal viewing size while weighing three to ten times less. The second lever is resolution. A 12-megapixel phone photo is 4000 pixels wide, but most screens, emails and web pages show it at 1200–1920 pixels. Scaling a photo down to the size it will actually be viewed at often saves more than quality alone. PDFWix lets you combine both: set a maximum width, set a quality, and optionally a target size in KB for forms that enforce a hard limit.
Typical size reduction: 60–90% · Processing: 100% in your browser · Formats: JPG · PNG · WebP
Need the photo inside a document? After compressing, turn it into a PDF with JPG to PDF, or shrink an existing PDF with Compress PDF.
Open PDFWix Compress Image, add the photo, type 100 in the Target size box and click Compress images. PDFWix lowers the quality step by step until the file is under 100 KB. For very large photos, also set a max width such as 1200 px.
Slightly, but at 70–85% quality the difference is not visible at normal viewing size. Lower settings save more space with more visible softening.
Yes. Because PNG has no quality setting, PDFWix saves compressed PNGs as WebP, which keeps transparency and is usually 60–80% smaller.
No. Compression happens in your browser using its built-in image encoder. The files never leave your device.
Yes. Drop a whole batch. A free account lets you download them all as one ZIP; otherwise each file downloads individually.
Yes — free, with no watermark on the output.