What happens when you compress JPG photos?
A JPG stores a photo in small blocks of pixels. When you compress it, fine texture and tiny color shifts inside those blocks are simplified. At sensible settings your eyes cannot tell. Push too far and you start to see blocky patches in skies and soft halos around text.
That is why FileKiwi searches for the quality level instead of using one fixed number. A busy street scene can be squeezed harder than a portrait with smooth skin and a plain wall behind it.
One thing to avoid is compressing the same JPG again and again. Each save throws away a little more detail. Keep your original photo, and always compress from that copy.
Photos with lots of fine texture, like grass, gravel or a crowd, need more data than calm scenes. Do not worry if two photos of the same size end up with very different results. That is normal and shows the search adapting to each picture.
A good rule of thumb: compare the result with the original at normal viewing size, not zoomed in to 400%. That is how other people will see it.
Common reasons to shrink a JPEG
| Situation | What usually helps |
|---|---|
| Attaching photos to an email | Normal compression, then send several in one message |
| Website or blog images | Resize to the display width, compress, consider WebP |
| Online form with a size limit | Use a target preset such as 100 KB |
| Sharing a set of holiday photos | Batch compress and download as ZIP |
Phone photos are often far larger in pixels than any screen. If a picture is meant for a web page, check its width first. Halving the width cuts the pixel count to a quarter, which shrinks the file more than any quality setting.
If your source is a PNG screenshot that you want as a photo style JPG, convert it with PNG to JPG first. For a format made for modern websites, try JPG to WebP.
