Compress Image

Modern cameras and phones produce enormous images. A single phone photo is 3-12 MB; a screenshot from a 4K monitor is 5+ MB; a PNG export from a design tool can hit 50 MB. Most of that data is wasted — the human eye can't see the difference between a quality-90 and quality-75 JPG, but the file size halves. Compression exploits that gap.

Three things decide an image's file size: resolution (more pixels = more bytes), format (JPG is lossy, PNG is lossless, WebP sits in between), and quality setting (lower quality = smaller file, more artifacts). Compressing usually means lowering the quality setting; sometimes it also means converting formats (a photo stored as PNG should be JPG; a flat-color logo stored as JPG should be PNG).

The right quality preset depends on the destination. For web, 'balanced' is usually right — small enough to load fast, indistinguishable from the original to most viewers. For email attachments, 'light' is usually enough. For thumbnails and previews, 'strong' is fine. For archival or print, don't compress at all — keep the original.