"Without losing quality" really means "without losing quality anyone can see". Lossy formats always discard some data — the skill is discarding only what the eye does not notice. Four habits do almost all of the work.
1. Resize before you compress
The biggest saving is rarely the quality setting — it is the pixel count. A 4000-pixel photo shown at 1000 pixels carries sixteen times the pixels it needs. Resize to the size the image will actually be displayed at, with some headroom for zoom, and the file shrinks dramatically with no visible change.
Use our image resizer for exact sizes, or tick "limit the longest side" in the compressor.
2. Use the 70–85% quality range
JPG and WebP quality is not linear. Dropping from 100% to around 85% cuts the file substantially with no visible change; going from 85% to 70% saves more with changes only visible on close inspection. Below about 60%, blocky artefacts and colour banding start to appear, especially in smooth gradients and skin tones.
| Quality | What you get |
|---|---|
| 90–95% | Visually identical, modest saving |
| 75–85% | The sweet spot: much smaller, no visible change on screen |
| 60–70% | Smaller still; artefacts visible on close inspection |
| Below 60% | Blocking and banding; only for thumbnails |
3. Pick the right format
- Photos: JPG, or WebP for websites. PNG photos are often several times larger than the JPG equivalent.
- Logos, screenshots, text: PNG, which keeps sharp edges perfectly.
- Websites: WebP usually beats JPG at the same quality.
Changing a photo from PNG to JPG is often the single biggest saving available. See JPG vs PNG vs WebP.
4. Drop the hidden metadata
Phone photos carry EXIF metadata: camera model, settings, and often the GPS location where the photo was taken. Re-encoding an image through a browser-based tool strips it, which saves a little space and removes location data you probably didn’t mean to publish.
What not to do
- Don’t compress the same JPG repeatedly. Each round loses a little more; always start from the original.
- Don’t enlarge small images. Upscaling makes files bigger and images softer.
- Don’t judge quality zoomed to 400%. Judge it at the size people will actually see.
Try it: Compress images without visible quality loss — free, no signup, runs in your browser.