Why large photos shrink so easily
Camera JPEGs are deliberately conservative: manufacturers encode at very high quality to preserve editing headroom, which means a large share of the file describes detail no display will ever resolve.
The result is that a 6MB photo often reaches 1MB with no perceptible change. You are mostly discarding margin, not image.
When to resize rather than compress
If the image is destined for the web, dimensions matter more than the byte count. A 6000px-wide photo displayed in a 1200px-wide column wastes bandwidth and slows your page regardless of how well it is compressed.
Set the width to roughly the largest size it will actually be displayed at — for full-width web images, 1920px is ample — and then compress. You will typically land far under 1MB with a visibly sharper result than compression alone would give.
Frequently asked questions
- Will 1MB compression visibly degrade my photo?
- Almost never, for a normal camera photo. The reduction comes out of encoding headroom rather than visible detail.
- What if my image is already under 1MB?
- Then there is nothing to do — the tool will leave it at high quality. You can still resize the dimensions or change format if you need to.