The upload box says "max 2 MB" and your photo is 9. You could email it to yourself and hope for the best, or you can compress it in a few seconds and keep it looking good. The key is understanding what you're trading away.
Quality versus size
A JPG has a quality setting, and dropping it is what shrinks the file. The clever part is that the first cuts are nearly free — going from maximum quality down to around 80% often halves the size with no visible difference. Keep going and you'll eventually see blocky patches, especially in smooth areas like skies. The trick is to stop just before that point.
How to compress an image
- Open the Image Compressor and drop in your photo.
- Lower the quality and watch the file size drop; ease back if the picture starts to look rough.
- Download the smaller version.
If your image is a screenshot, a logo, or anything with flat colours and sharp edges, it's probably a PNG, and those respond differently — resizing the dimensions down often shrinks them more than fiddling with quality does.
Pick the right format: JPG, PNG or WebP
The single biggest lever on file size is the format itself. A photograph saved as PNG can be five to ten times larger than the same photo as JPG, because PNG is lossless and was never meant for photos. If your large file is a PNG photo or screenshot, converting it to JPG — or better, WebP — often shrinks it more than any amount of quality tweaking. Use JPG for photographs, PNG only when you need transparency or crisp text, and WebP when you want the smallest file at the same quality (every current browser supports it). You can switch formats with the image converter.
Hitting a target size (under 2 MB, or 100 KB)
When something demands an image “under 2 MB” or “under 100 KB”, work down to it rather than guessing. Drop the quality a little, check the resulting size, and repeat — most of a file lives in fine detail your eye barely registers, so the first 40–50% of savings is usually invisible. For a hard limit like 100 KB you will normally also need to reduce the pixel dimensions, because there is only so far compression alone can go on a large image.
Resize before you compress
If an image is far larger than it will ever be displayed — a 6000-pixel-wide phone photo used as a 1200-pixel website banner — resizing its dimensions is the fastest, cleanest saving there is. Halving the width and height quarters the pixel count, and therefore roughly quarters the file, with no visible loss at the smaller size. Resizing first, then compressing, beats compressing a needlessly huge image.
Compress a whole batch at once
Shrinking images one at a time is fine for a couple, tedious for fifty. If you have a folder of photos to prepare for a website or an email, the bulk image compressor applies the same settings to every file at once and hands them all back as a ZIP.