How to Compress Images Without Losing Quality (Website, WhatsApp, Email)

By the DocEpic team · Updated 10 November 2026 · 3 min read

Large photos slow down websites, fill up email attachments and eat mobile data. Most of that size is invisible: a modern phone photo carries far more detail than any screen can show. Compressing it properly makes the file five to ten times smaller with no difference you can see. This guide explains how, and the one setting most people forget — the hidden data inside every photo.

Compress a photo

Compress Image shrinks JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC images at the level you choose.

1. Open Compress Image and add one or more images.
2. Choose Light, Recommended or Strong — or Custom and set the quality yourself. A quality of 60 to 80 looks the same as the original for most photos.
3. Choose the format: keep the same format, JPG to open everywhere, WebP for the smallest files on a website, or PNG to keep transparency.
4. Leave Remove hidden metadata ticked, then compress and download. Several images come as a ZIP file.

Images are processed in our server's memory and released as soon as the result is sent back — never written to disk.

Resize first for the biggest saving

A 12-megapixel photo is about 4000 × 3000 pixels, but a website rarely shows images wider than 1200 to 2000 pixels and a phone screen is about 1080 pixels wide. Shrinking the dimensions with Resize Image before compressing often saves more than compression alone, and the picture stays sharp. For a website, 1600 pixels on the long side is a good all-round size.

WebP for websites

If the images are for your own website or blog, WebP files are usually 25 to 35 % smaller than JPGs at the same quality, and every current browser shows them. Convert to WebP converts a batch in one go. For anything you upload to someone else's form or portal, stay with JPG, which is accepted everywhere.

Remove the hidden data

Phone photos carry metadata: the date, the phone model and often the exact GPS location where the photo was taken. Posting such a photo can reveal where you live. Remove hidden metadata strips this information while keeping the picture — worth doing for anything you share publicly.

When a form names an exact size

If a form says the photo must be under 20 KB or 50 KB, use Compress Image to KB instead: you type the limit and it finds the best quality that fits. See how to reduce photo size to 20 KB or 50 KB for the details.

Questions people ask