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The Ultimate Guide to Image Compression
Everyone’s been there: you try to attach a dozen photos to an email, only to have it rejected because the message is too large. Or you try to upload an image to a website but you can’t because, again, it’s too large.
Indeed, it was the need to send images across a wire by email that prompted the first highly compressed image format, the GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format. But the GIF suffered from quality issues and, later, royalty issues, and was rapidly superseded by the PNG and JPEG formats.
Today, so many formats exist that it’s hard to keep up. Specialized software is required to compress each of these formats. A common tool is Photoshop, which requires a paid subscription to use.
A free version also exists, but what a hassle to learn how to edit photos simply for the purpose of sharing a few images with friends or uploading them to a website, right?
That’s why we developed ImageCompressor.com, an extremely simple, totally secure image compression website that doesn’t require you to have any knowledge of formats or how to edit photos.
Below, we walk you through every detail you must know to use our free image compressor.
“Lossy” and “Lossless” Image Compression
Broadly speaking, two forms of image compression exist: Lossy and Lossless. Lossy algorithms achieve compression with resulting degradation of image quality. That degradation is often unnoticeable to the human eye, especially when the compression is minor, but it becomes more noticeable the more it’s compressed.
Also, print images have far more density than images on a screen, so degradations in the image might appear more starkly.
Lossless compression doesn’t degrade the image but also can’t achieve such high compression amounts as images that use the lossy compression method.
The choice to use lossy or lossless compression formats depends significantly on the use case. Archiving and medical imaging must be as accurate as possible, so lossless is the only option. However, sending images by email or viewing them on social media doesn’t require pixel-by-pixel perfection so web companies typically default to lossy compression formats, such as JPEG images.
