Why are screenshots so large?
- PNG is lossless. It stores every pixel exactly, which is right for text but heavy for anything with gradients, shadows or photos.
- High-density screens double the pixels. A 14-inch MacBook Pro shows its desktop at 1512 × 982 points by default but captures screenshots at 3024 × 1964 pixels: four times the pixels of what you see. Windows at 150–200% scaling works the same way.
- Busy content defeats compression. A wallpaper, a video frame or a photo inside the screenshot can make a PNG several megabytes on its own.
More on the PNG side in why is my PNG file so large.
Which format is best for screenshots: PNG, JPEG or WebP?
For screenshots of interfaces, text, code and diagrams, use PNG with a palette of up to 256 colors or WebP lossless: sharp edges stay sharp and the file shrinks a lot. For screenshots that are mostly a photo, a game or a video frame, JPEG or lossy WebP at quality 85–92 is smaller. JPEG below about 85 adds halos (ringing) around letters and smears colored text, which is why it is a poor default for UI. Lossy WebP at quality 90 sits in between: cleaner than JPEG on text and smaller, but larger than lossless for flat interfaces.
Measured on one 1440 × 1247 app screenshot (interface and text) that was already an optimized PNG. Raw screenshots usually save even more.
| Version | File size | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Original PNG | 203 KB | — |
| PNG, 256-color palette | 77 KB | −62% |
| WebP lossless | 63 KB | −69% |
| WebP lossy, quality 90 | 109 KB | −46% |
| JPEG, quality 90 | 188 KB | −7% |
| JPEG, quality 85 | 161 KB | −20% |
| Half size (720 px), PNG palette | 51 KB | −75% |
How do I compress a screenshot without blurring the text?
- Open Compress PNG and drop one screenshot or a batch of up to 100. Nothing is uploaded.
- Keep Same as original: the PNG stays a PNG, reduced to a palette of up to 256 colors, with transparency kept.
- If the screenshot came from a Retina or high-DPI screen and will be shown at normal size (docs, tickets, a blog post), turn on Limit width and enter half its width, for example 1512 for a 3024 px capture.
- Check small text at 100% zoom. If gradients show bands, raise the quality; at 95 or more the PNG is re-encoded losslessly instead.
- Download. If a file cannot be made smaller, the tool keeps the original.
What size should a screenshot be for docs, tickets or a website?
Match the space it is shown in. In a help article or blog post, the text column is rarely wider than 800 px, so 1200–1600 px wide is plenty, even for high-density screens. For a bug report or a chat message, the full capture is fine once compressed, because people zoom in to read details. On a website, cap the width at twice the column width and aim for 50–200 KB per screenshot; if one is still heavier, it probably contains a photo or a gradient and will compress better as lossy WebP or JPEG at quality 85–92.
How do I change the default screenshot format on a Mac?
macOS saves screenshots as PNG. To switch to JPEG, open Terminal and run defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg; killall SystemUIServer. Other accepted values include png, heic, tiff and pdf; run the same command with png to go back. Because JPEG softens small text, switching only pays off if most of your screenshots are photos or video frames. For interface screenshots, keep PNG and compress the ones you share.
How do I change the screenshot format on Windows?
Snipping Tool (Win + Shift + S) and Win + Print Screen save PNG files to the Screenshots folder inside Pictures. As of October 2026, Snipping Tool has no setting to change that automatic format. To get a JPEG, open the capture in Snipping Tool, press Ctrl + S and pick JPG as the file type, or compress the saved PNGs in a batch afterwards.
If the screenshots go on a website, WebP lossless is often the smallest option of all; see convert screenshots to WebP.