Make your photos much smaller.

Drop in a picture and it comes back as a small text file. Keep that file, send it, store it. Whenever you want the photo again, drop the text file back in and there it is.

60×
smaller than the raw picture
Free
no account, no sign up, no limits
Private
your photo is deleted after an hour
Instant
nothing to download or install

Three steps, that's all

No settings to learn. Drop a picture in and read the answer.

1

Drop in your photo

Anything from your phone or camera. JPEG, PNG, the lot. You don't need an account and there is nothing to install.

2

See what you saved

You get the picture back beside the original, so you can judge it yourself, along with the old size and the new one.

3

Keep the file

Download it and keep it anywhere. When you want the photo again, drop the file into Decompress and it comes back under its original name.

Two ways to do it

Pick whichever suits the picture. You choose on the compress page.

Smallest — for sharing and storing

Squeezes the photo down to roughly a sixtieth of its size. A small amount of fine detail is given up to get there, which for a holiday snap or a profile picture you will not notice.

Good for: photos to send, backups, anything going on a website.

Perfect — when nothing may change

Gives you back exactly the picture you put in, pixel for pixel, with nothing altered at all. The file is bigger, about the size of a PNG.

Good for: artwork, scans, documents, anything you'll edit later.

What is actually happening

Skip this if you like. The photo comes back either way.

A picture is just numbers

Every photo is a long list of numbers, one for the colour of each dot. A big photo is millions of them, and most of them repeat something you already know: the sky here is much the same as the sky an inch to the left.

A trained network guesses

We taught a small program, by showing it eight hundred photographs, which parts of a picture can be guessed from the rest. It only writes down the parts it could not guess.

The rest becomes text

What's left gets packed as tightly as mathematically possible and written out as ordinary text. You can open the file in Notepad and look at it. It just needs the same program to read it back.

Worth knowing

Three straight answers, because we'd rather tell you now.

It is not a secret code

The file looks like gibberish, but it isn't locked. Anyone with the same program can read it. Don't use this to hide anything.

Only this site opens them

The file only makes sense to the program that made it, a bit like a document that needs the right app. Come back here to open it.

Not a replacement for JPEG

This is a demonstration, and a good one, but your phone's camera app is not about to change. Use it for the fun of watching a photo become text.

Give it a go

It takes about five seconds and costs nothing.