Image Compression for Photographers: A Guide for People Who Actually Care About Quality
Export settings, generation loss, colour profile preservation, sharpening for web — the complete guide to compressing photos without compromising your work.
Exporting is often treated as a technicality at the end of the process, but it's the step that decides whether your colour work and fine detail actually survive the trip to the viewer's screen. Careless export settings can undo careful retouching. Understanding what the encoder does to your image lets you make informed decisions about every export.
The Generation Loss Problem
JPEG is a lossy format. Every time you open and re-save a JPEG, you add another generation of compression artifacts — even at quality 95. Two or three save cycles at high quality are generally invisible, but the loss is cumulative and irreversible. The rule: always edit from the original RAW or TIFF, and compress to JPEG as the final step.
Never use a JPEG you downloaded from social media as an editing source. It has already been through at least two lossy passes — yours (export) and the platform's (upload compression). Start from RAW or original full-quality TIFF.
Optimal Export Settings for Web
- ●Quality: 80–85 for JPEG, 75–80 for WebP. Quality 90+ yields diminishing returns — the file size increase outweighs any quality gain at screen resolution.
- ●Colour space: sRGB for web. Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB display incorrectly in browsers that don't colour-manage (most of them, in practice).
- ●Resolution: 72 PPI for web files — this metadata has no effect on quality, but Photoshop's default 300 PPI setting can add unnecessary metadata and confuse some CMS tools.
- ●Sharpening: Apply light output sharpening for web — about 50% Amount, 0.5px Radius in Lightroom "For Screen". Downsampling to web dimensions softens images, and a sharpening pass restores perceived crispness.
- ●Strip metadata: Remove EXIF before publishing publicly. GPS coordinates are in your photos unless you shot with location services disabled.
JPEG vs. WebP for Portfolio Delivery
WebP at quality 75 produces files roughly 30% smaller than JPEG at quality 85, with equal or better visual fidelity. WebP browser support is near-universal (97%+) in 2026. For a photography portfolio, the payload savings are significant — a gallery of 20 images drops from 12 MB to 8 MB, meaningfully improving LCP and reducing mobile data usage for viewers.
# Batch export to WebP using cwebp
# Best for: photo libraries, portfolio galleries
for f in exports/*.jpg; do
cwebp -q 78 -metadata none "$f" -o "\${f%.jpg}.webp"
done
# Or with ImageMagick for mixed formats:
magick mogrify -format webp -quality 78 -strip exports/*.{jpg,png}Lightroom and Capture One Export Settings
- ●Lightroom: File → Export → Quality 80, sRGB, Resize to Long Edge 2400px for full-res web, 1200px for social
- ●Lightroom WebP: Export → File Settings → JPEG → switch to WebP plugin (e.g. "LR/Mogrify") or post-process via CLI
- ●Capture One: Output → Recipe → JPEG Quality 80, sRGB, Sharpening "Screen" preset, strip location data
Client Delivery: When to Use Which Format
- ●Email preview gallery: JPEG quality 75 at 1200px long edge — keeps attachment size manageable
- ●Online gallery (Pixieset, Pic-Time): JPEG quality 85–90 at 2400px — platforms recompress further, start with quality headroom
- ●Print order: TIFF or JPEG quality 95 at full resolution — never compress for print delivery
- ●Social media: JPEG quality 85 at 1080px — platforms compress on upload regardless
Quick web compression without leaving the browser: compress your images with a live quality preview — drag the slider and watch the size estimate update before you download.
Ready to try it?
All tools run entirely in your browser — no uploads, no account required.
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