Compressing image files is a great way to save on storage space on Windows 11 and 10.

Large image files can waste many megabytes, even gigabytes, of drive storage space on your PC. For that reason alone, it’s a good idea to either delete superfluous image files or compress the ones you want to keep.

There are quite a few different ways you can compress images within Windows 11. As such, here are six alternative methods for compressing images in Windows 11.

There’s no shortage of online compression tools on the World Wide Web. Those are utilities that reduce the data size of uploaded image files. Optimizilla is an online image compression tool with which you can compress GIF, JPG, and PNG files. This is how you can compress images with Optimizilla.

If you don’t want to compromise picture quality, reducing images’ dimensions is a good alternative method to utilizing compression tools. Smaller pictures have lower file sizes. Windows 11’s Paint app includes sufficient options for reducing the width and height of pictures. You can resize your photos with Paint as follows:

Paint also has a cropping tool with which you can erase the outside edges of images. As cropping removes some of a picture, it reduces the overall data size of its file. So, cropping can be a good compression method for photos that look like they do with such editing.

This is how to crop a photo in Paint:

A ZIP is a compressed archive format that can include multiple files. Zipping a selection of images will reduce their overall file size. Some users compress images in ZIP archives to reduce their combined file size for email attachments. Windows 11 includes a ZIP option with which you can compress image files as follows:

Double-click your new ZIP archive to open it much the same as a folder. You’ll see all the compressed images within the archive. The Compressed size column shows the reduced file size for each picture in the archive.

If you ever want to decompress the ZIP file, click the Extract all option in Explorer. Then you can select a path for an extracted folder on the window that opens by selecting Browse. Click Extract to decompress the archive at the selected folder location.

There are numerous image file formats. JPG is the preferred compressed format for website images because it has a lower average file size. Images with the JPG format generally have smaller data sizes than TIFF, PNG, and BMP files. If there are many TIFF and BMP images on your PC, converting them to JPG will free up some storage space. You can convert images to JPG simply by saving them to that format with Paint like this.

Third-party image compression software packages include the tools you’ll need to quickly reduce photos’ file sizes. There are plenty of freely available image compressors for Windows to choose from. RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is easy to use and efficient freeware compression utility for JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats. This is how to compress photos with RIOT.

What image compression method do you prefer? You can get significant image file size reductions with the RIOT and Optimizilla compression tools (albeit at the expense of picture quality). However, the other methods will also reduce file sizes for pictures to varying extents. So, you’ll free up some hard drive storage space by compressing your photos with any of the above methods.

Jack has been a freelance tech journalist for more than a decade. He has covered Windows Vista, 7, 10, and 11 topics within a multitude of guides for MakeUseOf and numerous other websites.

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