While our digital cameras or even our smartphones increase the resolution of the photos taken from generation to generation, we must not forget that at the same time, the size of these files continues to increase. More pixels in our photos inevitably lead to more weight for the file!
While this is good news for image quality, it can sometimes cause problems when you want to share these photos via email or messaging apps.
It is therefore essential to have tools at hand that allow us to reduce the "weight" of the images that we have to send or post on the Internet, while losing as little quality as possible. Below we have selected some of the most popular free online tools.
Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a tool that allows you to compress images online and is really very intuitive. It works with JPG, PNG, SVG, GIF and WEBP files and allows you to choose between "lossless" and "lossy" compression. A paid "pro" version allows you to customize certain parameters.
The only small downside is that the utility limits the size of the files to be compressed to 10MB maximum.
I did a test with a 5.61MB photo of a very pretty cow and the lossless compression allowed me to reduce the weight of the image by only 2% while the lossy compression was much more radical since I reduced the file by 91% or 514kb. The 514kb file remains of very good quality.
Optimizilla: a combination of algorithms to compress images
Optimizilla is a really interesting compression utility. Combining several compression algorithms, it is able to process JPG or PNG files.
One of the strong points of this tool is that it allows you to adjust the compression levels using a slider and to very simply compare the image before and after compression in order to ensure that the quality remains good.
Finally, this tool allows you to process up to 20 images at the same time.
By testing the tool with my 5.61MB cow photo and reducing the quality to 80%, I managed to reduce the image size by 85% (i.e. 856kb).
ezgıf
EzGIF is a toolbox dedicated to GIF files but also offers PNG, JPG and WebP image optimizers. If you try this site, you will discover that it is indeed much more than an image compressor… but one of its features is compression.
The tool offers several compression options: lossless, with a file size target (which can be very useful) or with a quality factor (from 0 to 100).
When testing with my cow, lossless optimization proved to be ineffective (-0.06%), optimization with a quality factor of 80 allowed me to reduce the size to 1.07MB (81%) and by setting a size target of 500kb, I obtained an image with a very satisfactory quality of 497.74kb.
ILoveIMG
Just like EzGIF, ILoveIMG is more of an image processing toolbox with, among other things, a tool that allows you to compress images. Besides, they are the ones who make the very good ILovePDF the toolbox for PDF!
ILoveIMG is able to optimize JPG, PNG and GIF files.
On the other hand, the tool does not offer any options and will compress your image by selecting the best quality / weight ratio. It is a little frustrating but devilishly effective if you do not want to ask yourself any questions.
In the case of my cow, the file went from 5.61MB to 979KB (i.e. -83%) with a very respectable quality!
kraken.io
Kraken.io is a tool that supports JPG, PNG, and GIF files. While it has payment options (the cheapest option is $5 per month), it does offer (provided you register) a free option for images up to 1MB and a maximum of 100MB per month. 1MB is definitely a bit tight… but the tool can still help out!
The utility offers, like all others, several optimization modes: lossy, lossless or an "Expert" mode where you can adjust the settings.
Among the small advantages in favor of this tool, the possibility of downloading a ZIP file from the site containing all the images you want to compress but also the possibility of searching for them online on Box, Google Drive or Dropbox.
In short, if you can't find what you're looking for to compress images among these 5 online tools... I don't know what to do for you!
