Compress a PNG Without Losing Quality
Short answer
PNG is lossless, so a lossless re-save will not shrink it. Real savings come from storing fewer colours — often invisible on logos, text and flat graphics.
Drop a PNG here
or drop your file here.
Nothing is uploaded — it stays on your device.
Runs in your browser — your file is never uploaded.
Add an image, then press "Compress image".
This question has a different answer for PNG than it does for JPG, and the difference catches people out. JPEG is lossy, so compressing it always costs something. PNG is already lossless — which means a genuinely lossless re-save has nothing to discard, and will not make the file meaningfully smaller. It can even come out slightly larger.
So the honest framing is not lossless versus lossy, but visible versus invisible. Reducing a PNG's colour budget is technically lossy, yet on the images PNG is actually good at — logos, icons, screenshots, diagrams, anything with flat colour and sharp edges — the reduction is frequently impossible to see. Such images contain far fewer than 256 distinct colours to begin with, so capping them at 256 discards nothing at all.
Where it does show is smooth gradients and photographs. A sky or a skin tone spread across thousands of subtle shades will band visibly once you cut to 64 colours. If your PNG is a photograph, the real win is not PNG compression at all — converting it to a JPG will beat any colour budget you pick, at a fraction of the size.
How to compress a PNG with no visible quality loss
- 1Add the PNG. Drop it in — it never leaves your device.
- 2Start at 256 colours. Invisible on most logos, icons and screenshots.
- 3Compare the result. Check the preview and the size saved.
- 4Go lower if it holds up. Flat graphics often survive 64 colours.
Frequently asked questions
Is 256 colours really lossless for a logo?+
Effectively yes for most logos, because they contain fewer than 256 distinct colours already. When that is true the palette covers every colour present and nothing is changed at all.
Why does my screenshot compress so well?+
Screenshots are mostly flat interface colours and text, so they contain very few distinct colours and produce long repeated runs — exactly what PNG's DEFLATE compressor squeezes hardest.