Free Image Compressor

Target a size, not a quality number

Most compressors give you a quality slider and leave you guessing. You export at 80, it is still too big, you try 60, now it looks bad, you settle on 70 and hope. That is backwards — you usually know the size you need, not the quality number that produces it.

This tool works the other way round. Tell it the file size you are aiming for and it runs a binary search across quality levels, encoding for real at each step, and keeps the highest quality that still fits. Ten probes lands within a few kilobytes, so you get the best-looking file that meets the limit rather than one that overshoots it.

The 2 MB YouTube limit

YouTube rejects custom thumbnails over 2 MB. The default target here is 1900 KB, which leaves headroom without wasting quality by compressing to 500 KB "to be safe". A 1280×720 photographic thumbnail typically lands well under the limit anyway; it is oversized exports straight out of a design tool that fail.

When quality alone cannot get there

If an image still will not fit at the lowest sensible quality, the tool reduces the pixel dimensions in steps instead of pushing quality into visible blocking. Fewer, cleaner pixels beat more, mushier ones — especially for text.

JPG or WebP

WebP typically produces files around 30% smaller than JPG at the same visual quality, and every current browser and platform reads it. Choose JPG when something in your pipeline is old or fussy; choose WebP whenever you can. Both are offered here because "universal" and "smallest" are genuinely different jobs.

Need different dimensions as well as a smaller file? The social media image resizer handles the crop, and the thumbnail preview confirms the result still reads at feed size.

Last updated August 9, 2026.