Progressive JPEG: What It Is and How to Create One

A baseline JPEG is stored top to bottom, so on a slow connection it appears line by line. A progressive JPEG is stored in several passes: first a blurry version of the whole picture, then sharper and sharper refinements. The total file is often a few percent smaller for large photos, and the early full-frame preview makes pages feel faster, which is why progressive encoding is a classic web optimization tip.

Here is the honest part: browsers create JPEGs through their own canvas encoder, and that encoder always writes baseline JPEG. This page therefore recompresses your JPG and JPEG files at quality 82, keeps their dimensions and removes their metadata, which usually saves far more bytes than progressive encoding would, but the files it produces are not progressive. For true progressive output use one of the desktop methods described below.

How to use the Progressive JPEG Converter

1. Drop your images onto the upload area, click it to choose files, or paste an image with Ctrl+V. This page accepts JPG and JPEG files, many at once and up to 80 MB each.
2. Add your JPG files and keep quality 82, or lower it to 75 for web images. The size badge shows how much the recompression saves.
3. If you need progressive files, take the downloaded JPGs through a desktop tool, for example jpegtran -progressive -copy none in.jpg out.jpg, which converts losslessly to progressive.
4. Check the result with the before/after slider: drag the divider across the preview and read the new dimensions, file size, quality and percentage saved underneath. Any change to the settings re-processes every image automatically.
5. Download a single image, or use Download all (ZIP) for the whole batch. Under More options you can also set a DPI value and a file-name pattern with {name}, {w} and {h}.

Getting real progressive JPEGs

• jpegtran or MozJPEG. Both are free command-line tools; MozJPEG writes progressive JPEGs by default and also compresses very efficiently.
• Image editors. Photoshop's Save for Web and GIMP's export dialog offer a "Progressive" option when saving JPG.
• Your CMS or CDN. Many image CDNs and optimization plugins serve progressive JPEG automatically.
• Often better: modern formats. WebP and AVIF usually save more than progressive JPEG; try the WebP optimizer.

Progressive encoding matters most for large photos above roughly 10 KB on slow connections. For small images and thumbnails baseline is just as good and sometimes smaller.

Private, free and fast

The whole job runs in your browser: images are decoded, resized and re-encoded on your own device, so nothing is uploaded to a server. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no daily limit, and location and camera data (EXIF) are removed from every result.