How to Compress a PNG (and When to Use JPG Instead)
A PNG photograph is usually the wrong format, not just a big file β and that's why compressing it barely helps.
People often arrive wanting to compress a PNG and leave disappointed, because PNG is lossless β it is designed not to throw anything away. If your PNG is enormous, the productive question is usually not "how do I compress this" but "should this have been a PNG at all".
What PNG is good at
Flat colour, hard edges, text, logos, screenshots of interfaces, and anything needing transparency. For those, PNG is both small and perfectly crisp β and far better than JPG, which smears coloured fringes around sharp edges.
What it's bad at
Photographs. A photo has millions of subtly different colours and no flat areas, which is the worst case for PNG's compression. The same photo as a high-quality JPG is routinely five to ten times smaller with no visible difference. If your big PNG is a photo, converting it is the fix.
How to shrink one either way
If it is a photo: convert it to JPG, then compress with the quality slider. If it needs transparency: convert to WEBP instead, which keeps the transparency and is still much smaller than PNG. If it must stay PNG, resizing to the dimensions you actually display is the main lever left.
Shrink your image now β free
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