JPEG, also shortened to JPG, is a popular file format for storing photos and other types of images. With over a trillion photos being taken each year, that is a huge amount of data. Fortunately, you can compress this format using 'lossy' compression, which removes some data from the image, and can reduce its file size considerably. Any quality setting above around 75 should not affect how the image is viewed. The reduction in quality will barely be noticeable. This in turn, means less Internet bandwidth usage, less storage requirements, and faster transfers.
Image optimization is both an art and a science: an art because there is no one definitive answer for how to best compress an individual image, and a science because there are well-developed techniques and algorithms that can help significantly reduce the size of an image. (source: Google Web Fundamentals – Image Optimization).
A lower quality setting will make the photo size much smaller, though will also degrade the image. This can be useful when speed/storage space is more important than quality (for journalists in the field, for example).
The next setting allows you to resize the image, on top of the above optimizations. Select a percentage value, and the image dimensions will be reduced accordingly, while keeping the aspect ratio intact.
Online Image Optimizer. The Online Image Optimizer from Dynamic Drive is a web-based tool for compressing your images further. You can either provide the link to the image you wish to optimize, or upload it from your local machine. Besides optimization, you can select what output you’d like the optimized image to be (the default is the same. As a result, web pages that use these high resolution images are slower to load and the images themselves take up more space on your web server than an optimized image. Since you can optimize images yourself pretty easily, it is in your best interest to optimize images before you upload them to your website.
The metadata in an image stores information about the image, that typically include what camera or software was used to creat it, the settings, and even the name of the creator. In some cases, it may be desirable to remove this information, resulting in an even smaller size.
This website provides an interface to do this conversion, resulting in much smaller, and faster images. For website developers, optimizing images with a quality setting of 80 to 85 will pass most speech checkers, for example Google's PageSpeed Insights.
To reduce your JPEG, simply click the 'Select a JPEG file' button. And then click 'Optimize'. You will see the size savings, and a button to download the optimized JPEG. We recommend a quality setting of 85. This will result in smaller images without noticeable quality loss.