For most web photos, a JPEG quality setting between 75 and 85 gives the best balance of sharpness and file size. Use 85 to 90 for portfolio images and prints you'll edit later, and avoid 100, which creates much larger files with almost no visible improvement.
For most web photos, a JPEG quality setting between 75 and 85 gives the best balance of sharpness and file size. Use 85 to 90 for portfolio images and prints you'll edit later, and avoid 100, which creates much larger files with almost no visible improvement.
We tested that advice instead of just repeating it. We took a 1200-pixel photo of a laptop and saved it at quality levels from 100 down to 40 using Pillow, the standard Python imaging library. Quality 80 produced a file 75% smaller than quality 100, and side by side at normal viewing size the two looked nearly identical.
Below you'll find the full results, what the quality number really controls, the right setting for each job and how to avoid common mistakes like saving the same JPEG again and again. To try different settings on your own photos, use the free image quality changer, which runs in your browser.
In this guide:
JPEG is a lossy format. It throws away detail your eyes are least likely to miss, then packs what's left very efficiently. The quality slider decides how much it throws away.
Behind the scenes, the encoder splits the image into 8×8 pixel blocks and converts each one into frequency information. Fine detail and subtle colour shifts sit in the high frequencies. A lower quality setting divides those values by bigger numbers, rounding more of them to zero, which shrinks the file.
The number isn't a percentage of quality, and it isn't standard across apps. Quality 80 in one program can look different from quality 80 in another, because each encoder maps the slider to its own compression tables.
We resized a Wikimedia Commons photo of a MacBook to 1200 × 896 pixels, then saved it with Pillow at each quality level with optimisation turned on. We also measured PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio), a common objective measure of how closely a compressed image matches the original. Higher is better, and values above about 35 dB usually look very close to the source.
| Quality | File size | Size vs quality 100 | PSNR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 782 KB | 100% | 51.6 dB |
| 95 | 477 KB | 61% | 42.0 dB |
| 90 | 330 KB | 42% | 37.1 dB |
| 85 | 249 KB | 32% | 34.6 dB |
| 80 | 197 KB | 25% | 33.1 dB |
| 75 | 159 KB | 20% | 32.2 dB |
| 70 | 135 KB | 17% | 31.7 dB |
| 60 | 100 KB | 13% | 30.9 dB |
| 50 | 78 KB | 10% | 30.5 dB |
| 40 | 59 KB | 8% | not measured |
A second, simpler photo of a microphone pop filter followed the same curve: quality 80 came out at 24% of the quality-100 size. The biggest savings happen between 100 and 85. Below 75, each step saves fewer kilobytes while visible damage grows.
Your own photos will differ. Busy scenes such as foliage, crowds or gravel compress less well than skies, walls or studio shots.
Here's a practical cheat sheet based on our test and common publishing practice.
| Use | Suggested quality | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Blog and website photos | 75 to 82 | Big savings, little visible loss |
| Hero and banner images | 80 to 85 | Large on screen, so artefacts show more |
| Online shop product photos | 82 to 88 | Shoppers zoom in on texture and colour |
| Email attachments | 70 to 80 | Keeps messages under size limits |
| Social media uploads | 85 to 90 | Platforms recompress, so start with headroom |
| Photo prints | 90 to 95 | Paper shows fine detail at high resolution |
| Archive or editing master | Save a lossless copy | Use PNG, TIFF or RAW instead of JPEG |
| Thumbnails | 60 to 75 | Small size hides artefacts |
When in doubt, start at 80, view the image at 100% zoom, and only go higher if you can see a problem in areas such as skin, sky gradients or fine text.
It sounds sensible to pick the highest setting for the best result. With JPEG, though, 100 doesn't mean lossless, and it isn't worth the extra size.
The Pillow JPEG documentation says values above 95 should be avoided, because 100 disables parts of the compression algorithm and produces large files with hardly any gain in quality. Our test agreed: quality 100 was 64% bigger than 95 and four times the size of 80.
If you truly need a perfect copy, use a lossless format. PNG works for graphics, screenshots and images with text. For photos you plan to edit further, keep the camera RAW file or a 16-bit TIFF and export JPEGs from that.
Quality settings matter, but dimensions matter more. A 4000-pixel photo saved at quality 70 can still be several times bigger than a 1200-pixel version at quality 85.
Follow this order for web images:
For a blog with a content column 800 pixels wide, a 1600-pixel image covers retina screens with room to spare. Anything bigger just adds weight. The image resizer handles the resize step in the browser, so you can then fine-tune quality separately.
Don't upscale small images to make them look sharper. Enlarging a photo invents pixels and makes JPEG artefacts more visible, not less.
Every time you open a JPEG, edit it and save it again as JPEG, the encoder throws away more detail. This is called generation loss, and it builds up quickly.
To protect your images, keep an untouched original and do all edits from that master copy. Export a JPEG only at the very end. If you need to make repeated changes, work in a lossless format and convert once.
Some tools offer lossless JPEG operations, such as 90-degree rotation or crops aligned to the 8×8 block grid, which don't re-encode the image. Use them when you can.
JPEG remains the safest choice for compatibility, but modern formats can shrink files further. All current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari support WebP and AVIF.
| Format | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|
| JPEG | Works everywhere, fast to encode, great for photos | No transparency, older compression |
| WebP | Often smaller than JPEG, supports transparency | Savings vary, and some photos gain little |
| AVIF | Often the smallest at similar quality, supports HDR | Slower to encode, fewer editing tools |
| PNG | Lossless, ideal for text, logos, screenshots | Very large for photos |
WebP results depend on the image. In our test, WebP at quality 80 cut the pop filter photo from 99 KB (JPEG 80) to 54 KB, but the busier laptop photo stayed about the same size. Test with your own content before converting a whole library.
Many sites serve AVIF or WebP with a JPEG fallback using the HTML picture element, so every browser gets the best format it can handle.
Images are often the heaviest part of a web page, so getting quality right has a direct effect on load times. On a phone with a weak signal, the difference between a 780 KB photo and a 200 KB one can be a second or more.
Speed matters for search as well as visitors. Google uses Core Web Vitals, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), as part of its page experience signals. On many pages, the largest element is a hero image, so a lean, well-compressed file helps that metric directly.
Google's web.dev guide to choosing image formats walks through these trade-offs in more depth, including when lossy compression is the right call. The short version: pick a modern format where you can, resize properly and keep quality in the 75 to 85 range for photos.
Each app labels quality a little differently. Here's how to find the setting in popular tools:
Turn on "optimize" or "progressive" options where they exist. Optimisation shrinks files a little without changing quality, and progressive JPEGs appear gradually as they load, which feels faster on slow connections.
Run through this short list for every important image:
If you need to shrink a large photo quickly without opening an editor, the image downscaler reduces dimensions in one step. Pair it with a sensible quality setting and you'll cut page weight dramatically.
Quality 75 to 85 suits most web photos. It shrinks files dramatically compared with 100 while keeping them sharp at normal viewing size.
No. JPEG is always lossy. Quality 100 keeps more detail but still changes the image, and it produces very large files.
Yes, for most photos on screens. In our test, quality 80 was a quarter of the size of quality 100 and looked nearly identical at normal size.
Use 90 to 95 at the full print resolution. For professional printing, ask the printer whether they prefer TIFF or another lossless format.
Yes. Each new JPEG save recompresses the image and discards more detail. Edit from an original and export once.
Often, but not always. WebP can produce smaller files at similar quality, though savings depend on the photo. Test both on your images.
The quality setting was too low, or the image was compressed several times. Re-export from the original at a higher quality.
Aim for under about 200 KB for a typical blog photo and under 500 KB for a large hero image. Smaller is better if it still looks good.
Last checked: 18 October 2026. Rates, rules and app settings can change, so confirm anything important with the official source linked above.
To resize an image for the web, set the display dimensions you need (for example 1200×630 for Open Graph social cards), export at 1× or 2× that size, compress with a modern format such as WebP, and never upscale a small photo to invent detail.
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