Does Reddit Compress Images? What Happens to an Upload

Yes, in two different ways. The feed and the post page show a copy of each image from preview.redd.it, at most 1,080 pixels wide, and that copy is why most photos on Reddit look soft. The uploaded file on i.redd.it keeps its full size in pixels. But if it’s a JPEG carrying EXIF data, the camera settings, dates and often location that nearly every camera and editor writes into a photo, Reddit re-saves it at JPEG quality 75 on a scale of 0 to 100. Clicking an image in a post opens the full-size file, galleries included. With the Bellevue extension in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, holding Alt over an image in the feed shows it without opening the post.

Every measurement below was taken on 12 October 2026, signed in, in a 1400 × 900 window at standard pixel density unless stated, by reading the files Reddit served: their size in pixels, their format, and for JPEGs the quantization tables that set the quality they were saved at.

See every Reddit photo at the size it was uploaded. Install Bellevue →

Why do photos on Reddit look soft?

The feed and the post page don’t show the uploaded file. They show a copy from preview.redd.it, resized to 320, 640 or 1,080 pixels wide, whichever suits the space the window gives it. In a 1400 × 900 window that’s the 1,080-pixel copy. In a 1280 × 720 window the feed loads the 640-pixel copy and draws it 706 pixels wide, slightly enlarged.

Most uploads are much larger than that. Among the top posts of the past month in seven photo, art and chart subreddits (r/LandscapePhotography, r/wildlifephotography, r/DigitalArt, r/photocritique, r/dataisbeautiful, r/AskPhotography and r/analog), 51 were single images hosted by Reddit, and 44 of them were wider than 1,080 pixels. Three of them:

The film scan has 108 times the pixels of the copy the feed shows. Grain, feathers, brushwork: whatever was in those pixels, the copy can’t show it, and enlarging the copy doesn’t bring it back. Enlarging only spreads the same pixels further, as the post on zooming into images explains.

For a photo, the copy is a WebP file in Chrome and a JPEG in browsers that don’t take WebP, both lossy formats, which discard some detail to save space. Its address carries a signature: change the width in it and Reddit refuses the request, so there’s no asking preview.redd.it for a larger copy.

Does Reddit compress the original upload?

It depends on the file’s metadata, not its size. A JPEG that carries EXIF data is re-saved at JPEG quality 75, with its colour detail stored at half the width and half the height of the image (4:2:0 chroma subsampling). A JPEG without EXIF is kept byte for byte. Either way, the pixel dimensions stay as uploaded.

The evidence comes from two directions:

• Public posts. All 36 JPEGs among the sampled uploads use exactly the quantization tables of libjpeg, the standard JPEG library, at quality 75, with 4:2:0 colour and no EXIF. Photos from different cameras and editors don’t arrive that uniform; the re-save makes them so.
• Test uploads. The same image, uploaded from a Reddit account with and without EXIF, came back differently. With EXIF (a camera make and model, nothing else), a 1.74 MB quality-95 JPEG came back as a 0.94 MB quality-75 file, the EXIF gone. Without EXIF, it came back identical to the byte. A file whose only metadata was XMP, a separate metadata format editors use, also came back untouched.

Nothing is downsized. The largest file in the sample, the r/analog film scan, is 11218 × 11154 pixels, 125 megapixels, on i.redd.it. An r/LandscapePhotography post, Autumn on the shore of Lake Yamanaka, gives its size in the title as 3979x5306, and that’s the size of the file.

What quality 75 costs is small next to the feed copy. Viewed at actual size, it can smooth the finest grain and sensor noise a little and add faint banding to smooth skies. In the feed it makes barely any difference, since the feed shows the resized copy either way.

PNG files keep their pixels exactly, transparency included. A WebP upload is converted to a quality-75 JPEG.

How to see the original on Reddit

Click the image in a post. Reddit’s lightbox loads the file from i.redd.it, for a single image and for each image in a gallery, and fits it to the window. A click shows it at actual size. On the fairy wrens post, the lightbox fitted the 3469 × 4336 file at 720 × 900, and one click showed it at 3469 × 4336. The same held on two galleries, on r/travel and r/wildlifephotography: every image the lightbox loaded was the i.redd.it file. The mouse wheel doesn’t zoom there, and nothing goes past actual size.

To keep the file, right-click it in the lightbox and choose Save image as. Opened in a Chrome tab, the saved file can be zoomed past 100% in Chrome’s own image viewer. The guide to full-size Reddit images covers the other ways in, such as swapping preview.redd.it for i.redd.it in the address of Reddit’s image page.

To tell which one is on screen, right-click the image, choose Copy image address and look at the host in what you paste: preview.redd.it is the resized copy and i.redd.it is the upload.

What the lightbox can’t do is open the original from the feed: each image means opening its post first.

Charts and screenshots lose more in the feed

A PNG, such as a chart, a map or a screenshot, is uploaded lossless, but its feed copy isn’t. Chrome gets a lossy WebP, and browsers without WebP get a PNG reduced to 256 colours, while the file on i.redd.it has its pixels exactly as uploaded. Labels that are sharp in the upload smear in the copy.

The chart was uploaded 2500 pixels square, and the feed’s copy is 1,080 pixels square, so the copy loses both ways: fewer pixels, and lossy compression on the ones left.

How to upload to Reddit without losing quality

Remove the EXIF data before uploading, and Reddit keeps the JPEG exactly as it was exported. Or upload a PNG, whose pixels are always kept. These come from test uploads through Reddit’s website; the app wasn’t tested, and may prepare files differently.

• Remove EXIF before uploading. Leave metadata out in the editor’s export settings, or strip it with a metadata remover, and check the exported file has none left. Without EXIF, JPEGs at quality 95 and quality 100 came back from Reddit byte for byte.
• Don’t resize for Reddit. The upload keeps its full size, and the feed shows a copy at most 1,080 pixels wide whatever the upload is. Shrinking the file only takes detail away from the people who open it.
• Stay under about 20 MB. An 18.2 MB file uploaded, and a 23.9 MB file was left out of the post without a message. Reddit gave 20 MB as the limit when it launched image hosting (TechCrunch, 2016).
• Export JPEG or PNG, not WebP. A WebP upload came back as a quality-75 JPEG.
• Remove location data from PNGs yourself. The re-save drops a JPEG’s EXIF, GPS coordinates included. A PNG’s pixels are left as they are, and so was its EXIF block: it came back with the GPS coordinates still in it.

The feed copy is out of the uploader’s hands: everyone scrolling past sees a copy at most 1,080 pixels wide. Anyone who opens the image sees the upload at its full size.

Seeing the original from the feed with Bellevue

Reddit’s lightbox needs the post opened and stops at actual size. With Bellevue installed, hold Alt over an image in the feed and hover zoom shows its i.redd.it original in a popup beside the cursor. Tap Ctrl instead to open it full-screen, where the mouse wheel zooms in toward the cursor, past actual size. On 12 October 2026, straight from the feed, the popup showed the Lake Yamanaka photo’s 3979 × 5306 original, and a Ctrl tap opened the fairy wrens’ 3469 × 4336 file.

• Reddit’s image page, which Open image in new tab leads to from the feed, shows the original in Bellevue’s viewer instead of the resized copy.
• To check whether detail is in the file, press P in the viewer to show the pixels as squares rather than blending them, as the post on pixelated zoom describes.

The Reddit image viewer page sums up what Bellevue changes on Reddit, and the guide to full-size images on hover covers the popup’s settings.

Summary

• The feed and the post page show a copy from preview.redd.it, at most 1,080 pixels wide. That copy is why Reddit photos look soft.
• The upload on i.redd.it keeps its full size in pixels. A JPEG with EXIF data is re-saved at quality 75; one without EXIF is kept byte for byte. PNG pixels are always kept.
• Click an image in a post to open the upload, galleries included, and click again for actual size.
• To upload without the re-save, remove EXIF, don’t resize, stay under about 20 MB, and avoid WebP. Remove location data from PNGs, which Reddit leaves in.
• With Bellevue, hold Alt over an image in the feed to see the original, or tap Ctrl to open it full-screen and zoom past actual size.

See every Reddit photo at the size it was uploaded. Install Bellevue →