Compress a PNG
PNG files balloon fast; this tool cuts them down by reducing colors intelligently while keeping transparency intact. Drop in screenshots, logos or UI mockups and get a lighter file back in moments. There is no charge, no signup, and the graphics are processed entirely inside your browser tab.
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How it works
- Drop a PNG into the upload area.
- Choose a compression level, or leave the automatic setting on.
- Inspect the preview - pay attention to gradients and soft shadows.
- Download the smaller PNG with transparency preserved.
Worth knowing
PNG is a lossless format: it stores every pixel exactly, compressed with DEFLATE, the same algorithm ZIP uses. That guarantee is why a PNG screenshot of text stays razor sharp - and also why "compressing" a PNG at the same pixel dimensions has a hard floor. Truly random detail cannot be squeezed losslessly, so a noisy photograph saved as PNG barely shrinks no matter what settings you try.
The big wins come from color reduction. A standard PNG spends 3 or 4 bytes on every pixel; an indexed (palette) PNG spends 1, looking colors up in a table of at most 256 entries. Screenshots, flat illustrations, charts and logos rarely contain more than a couple hundred distinct colors once anti-aliasing is accounted for, so quantizing them to a well-chosen palette slashes the raw data before DEFLATE even starts. Dithering fills in the gaps so gradients do not band.
Know when to walk away from PNG entirely. Photographic content - anything from a camera - belongs in JPEG or WebP, which will be 5 to 10 times smaller with no visible penalty. WebP deserves special mention: its lossless mode beats PNG by around 26 percent on typical graphics, and its lossy mode supports the transparency JPEG lacks, so it covers both of PNG jobs at lower cost.
Transparency survives every operation here. The alpha channel is quantized along with the colors, so drop shadows and rounded corners keep their smooth edges. The one visible risk is subtle banding in long gradients after aggressive palette reduction; if you spot it, step the level down one notch and the palette grows to compensate.
Converting a truecolor PNG to a 256-color indexed PNG shrinks the raw pixel data from 4 bytes to 1 byte per pixel - a 75 percent reduction that happens before DEFLATE compression even begins.
What this tool will not do
- It will not meaningfully shrink photographic PNGs while staying visually lossless - convert those to WebP or JPEG instead.
- It will not hit an exact KB target; palette compression is content-dependent. Use the JPEG-to-KB tool when a form enforces a byte limit.
- It will not process animated PNGs (APNG) frame by frame; only the first frame is kept.
Questions people ask
Why did my PNG barely shrink at all?
It is probably a photograph or contains heavy noise. Lossless compression cannot discard real detail, and palette reduction helps little when an image genuinely uses tens of thousands of colors. Saving that image as WebP or JPEG will do far more.
Will compressing a PNG make my logo blurry?
No - pixel dimensions and edges stay exactly as they are. The only possible change is a reduced color count, which on a typical logo with a handful of brand colors is completely invisible.
Does PNG compression remove transparency?
Transparency is kept, including partial soft-edge transparency. Alpha values are folded into the palette, so shadows and anti-aliased edges continue to blend correctly over any background.
What is the difference between PNG-8 and PNG-24?
PNG-24 stores full truecolor at 3-4 bytes per pixel; PNG-8 uses a palette of up to 256 colors at 1 byte per pixel. This tool effectively converts 24 to 8 when the image allows it, which is where most of the savings come from.
Why do gradients look striped after compression?
That is banding: a long smooth gradient needs more distinct colors than a small palette provides. Lower the compression level so more colors are retained, or keep that particular image in truecolor.
Should screenshots be PNG or JPEG?
PNG, almost always. JPEG blurs the crisp one-pixel edges of text and UI lines with ringing artifacts, while PNG keeps them exact and usually ends up smaller on flat interface graphics anyway.
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