Photo Compressor FAQ: picture and image compressor questions answered
Photo Compressor is a free photo compressor built as a Chrome extension for images — not the air-tool kind of compressor some searches for this phrase turn up. It runs a full picture and image compressor toolkit directly inside Chrome, according to its Chrome Web Store listing. Install from the Chrome Web Store to try it on your own files before reading further.
The whole compression path stays on your machine — nothing is uploaded to a server at any step.
This page collects the real questions people ask about picture compressors and image compressors, and answers them honestly for our own extension. Photo Compressor is young — 358 users and 3 reviews in the Chrome Web Store at the time of writing — so we’re not going to pretend it has thousands of users or a long track record. What follows is a plain account of what it does, what it doesn’t do, and where it differs from established online tools.
The short version
If you only read one paragraph: Photo Compressor is a free Chrome extension that shrinks JPEG, PNG, WEBP and GIF files on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is no daily cap on how many pictures you push through it. Typical savings land in the 50-70% range, which is enough to get a phone photo under an email or upload limit without visibly degrading it.
Right-click any picture on a page and it lands compressed in the side panel — no saving the original first.
The two things it does that most compressors don’t are worth calling out early. You can name a target weight in kilobytes and let it find the quality setting that hits it, instead of dragging a slider and guessing. And you can right-click any picture you find on a web page and send it straight to the panel, without saving it first.
Batch work follows the same logic. Add a folder’s worth of pictures, apply one quality or one target weight to the whole set, and take the results away as a single ZIP with your own file names on them.
A real batch in the side panel: each picture keeps its own before-and-after weight so you can see what you traded.
Everything below expands on those points, plus the questions people actually ask before installing an image compressor: what happens to quality, which formats survive, what the batch limits are, and which browsers it runs in.
Official sources and documentation
Before the question list, here are the primary sources behind the technical claims on this page. The extension itself is listed on the Chrome Web Store, where its permissions, version history and current rating are public. The side panel and right-click menu are built on documented Chrome platform features — see the Chrome sidePanel API reference for how extensions attach a persistent panel to the browser window. Local, in-browser compression relies on the MDN documentation for canvas.toBlob(), the standard browser API for re-encoding image data without sending it anywhere. If you ever want to remove any extension, Google’s own support article on installing and managing Chrome extensions walks through the steps. For background on the metadata question below, see the Wikipedia entry on Exif. And for comparison, TinyPNG is the online compressor referenced throughout this FAQ.
The practical trade-off against online tools: no upload and no free-tier ceiling, at the cost of Chrome-only support.
Most of the substance lives in the twenty questions below — pricing, privacy, formats, batch limits and browser support, each answered directly and linked to the relevant page on this site where it helps to dig deeper.
Yes. Photo Compressor is completely free to install and use, with no subscription, no account requirement, and no daily limit on how many images you can compress. See the pricing page for the full picture — there is nothing hidden behind a paywall.
No. Every image is compressed locally in your browser using the canvas API — the file never leaves your machine. This is the main practical difference from online compressors that require an upload, and it’s the argument compared in detail on the online compressors comparison page.
The Chrome Web Store listing states that the extension does not collect user data, and its manifest does not request network permissions beyond the host access it needs to run on the current page. You can review exactly what permissions it asks for on the access page before installing.
For JPEG and WebP, compression is lossy — the file typically shrinks by 50-70% with a difference that is hard to notice at normal viewing sizes. Push the quality setting low enough and you will start to see blocky artifacts, especially around sharp edges and text. PNG output stays lossless by default, so quality is untouched there.
Lossy compression discards some of the original image data to make the file smaller — detail that mostly isn’t visible to the eye at normal zoom. Lossless compression, by contrast, only removes redundancy and reconstructs the exact original pixels. JPEG and WebP support both approaches; Photo Compressor uses lossy encoding by default for those formats because it delivers the biggest size reduction for photos.
Resizing changes the image’s dimensions in pixels — a 4000×3000 photo becomes, say, 1200×900. Compressing changes the file’s weight in kilobytes by re-encoding the pixel data more efficiently, without necessarily touching the dimensions. Photo Compressor focuses on compression: it can shrink a file dramatically while keeping the same pixel dimensions, which is what most people actually want before uploading a photo somewhere.
JPEG, PNG, WEBP and GIF. HEIC is not supported — if your photos come off an iPhone as HEIC, convert them to JPEG first before compressing. The full breakdown of supported formats and features is on the features page.
The alpha channel is preserved when the output stays PNG — transparent areas remain transparent after compression. If you convert a transparent PNG to JPEG, however, JPEG has no alpha channel, so transparency is lost and replaced with a solid background.
Being honest here: animation is not guaranteed. Photo Compressor processes GIF as a still image format, so an animated GIF run through it may lose its animation. If keeping the animation matters, use a tool built specifically for animated GIF compression instead.
Set a target file size in kilobytes — 100 in this case — and the extension automatically searches for the quality level that lands under that number, instead of you guessing with a quality slider. Step-by-step instructions are on the how-to-use page.
Yes. The target size field accepts any number of kilobytes — 20 KB, 50 KB, 200 KB, whatever the destination requires. This target-size mode is one of the features most online compressors skip in favor of a quality-only slider.
Compression runs as a batch, and there is no artificial cap on file count built into the extension. The real ceiling is how much memory your browser tab has available, which depends on your device and how large the source files are.
Yes, batch results can be downloaded together as a single ZIP file, so you don’t have to save each compressed image one at a time.
Yes. Once installed, compression itself runs entirely offline since it all happens locally in the browser. An internet connection is only needed to install the extension in the first place and to receive future updates.
Photo Compressor is a desktop Chrome extension, so it also works in other Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi. Firefox and Safari are not supported, because they use a different extension engine. See the docs page for setup details.
No. Chrome extensions cannot be installed on mobile Chrome at all — this is a limitation of the mobile browser itself, not something specific to Photo Compressor. It does not work on iOS or Android.
Compressed images are saved to your browser’s normal downloads folder, the same place any other Chrome download lands. Before saving, you can set a custom file name instead of keeping the original one.
Because compression re-encodes the image through the browser’s canvas, Exif metadata — including embedded GPS coordinates from a photo taken on a phone — is not carried over to the output file.
TinyPNG is a strong, well-established compressor with a more advanced algorithm, an API, a CDN integration and a WordPress plugin — it’s a genuinely capable product. The trade-off is that it uploads your files to its server to process them, and its free tier limits how much you can compress. Photo Compressor runs locally, is free without a usage cap, and adds a target-size-in-kilobytes mode and a right-click context menu that TinyPNG doesn’t have. See the full comparison on the online compressors page.
Right-click the extension’s icon in the Chrome toolbar and choose Remove from Chrome, or go to chrome://extensions and remove it from there. Google’s own guide to installing and managing extensions covers the same steps with screenshots.
Still have a question
The honest summary is that this is a small, focused tool rather than a compression platform. It does local compression, target weights and batch ZIPs well, and it does not try to be a CDN, an API or an image editor.
Four formats in, a weight target in kilobytes, and a batch that comes back as one ZIP.
If your question isn’t covered above, write to info@photocompressor.pictures. For everything else, the fastest path is to try the tool yourself: Install from the Chrome Web Store and run a test file through the image compressor directly, or check what it can do on the features page first.
