Compress a photo without uploading it

Make a photo file smaller

Your photo never leaves this page. Nothing is uploaded: it is opened and rewritten in your browser, and the page keeps working with the connection off.

Choose a photo

Or drop one on this box. Any photo your browser can show works. A HEIC photo from an iPhone opens in Safari; in other browsers, save it as a JPEG first.

How it works

1. Choose a photo. Pick one, or drop one on the box. Each photo tool keeps working with the connection switched off once its page has loaded, and the browser test runs every tool that way.
2. Set the quality. The slider starts in its upper middle, where most photos still look the same on a phone. Each change makes a new copy within a moment and shows its size next to the original’s.
3. Cap the size if you need to. The image compressor can keep a photo’s size or bring its longest side down to at most 4096, 2048, 1600, 1280 or 800 pixels. A photo that only has to look good on a screen rarely needs the full size its camera gave it, and fewer pixels save far more than the quality slider can.
4. Check the detail, then save. The two squares show the middle of the photo at full size. Look at hair, leaves, text and clear skies. Your original is not changed.

Choosing a quality

The slider sets how much detail the format may throw away. Browsers take it as a number from 0 to 1 for lossy formats such as JPEG and WebP, and this page shows it as a percentage.

• Near the top: close to the original, and often not much smaller.
• The upper middle: the range where most photos look the same on a phone but the file is much smaller. Start here.
• Low settings: blocks and smudges start to show, first in fine detail and smooth color.

Different browsers write files differently, so the same setting can give a slightly different size in Safari and in Chrome.

JPEG or WebP

JPEG opens everywhere: any email app, any computer, any printer. It has no transparency, so a clear area turns white. WebP is usually smaller at the same look: MDN puts lossy WebP at 25 to 35% smaller than JPEG on average, and it keeps transparency. Some older programs cannot open it. When the file is for somebody else, JPEG is the safe choice. Not every browser can write WebP; the page tells you when yours cannot.

What the saved file contains

• The photo, redrawn. It is the size you chose, in the standard sRGB colors a canvas uses.
• No camera, date or location data. The page draws the photo onto a canvas, which holds only pixels, so that data is left behind. It also checks the new file once more before offering it. That is a side effect of compressing, not a careful clean-up: the photo metadata remover is the tool for that.
• Nothing else from the original. Your original keeps everything it had, including its location, until you delete it.

Where Sealed helps, and where it doesn’t

It helps keep the full-quality original once you have sent the small copy. Photos and videos are sealed the moment they arrive, and afterwards you can remove the originals from Photos if you like. Sealed encrypts every file with AES-256-GCM before it is saved.

It doesn’t make photos smaller, and nothing on this page touches a photo in your vault. Until you delete them, the originals stay in Photos, outside the vault. The guide to how photo compression works explains what the slider trades away.