Compress Medical Record Images — Free, Fast & Private
Sharing medical records is routine — a second opinion, an insurance submission, a new consultant, a visa medical, a claim. What is not routine is the privacy exposure of the usual method: uploading a scan of your test results to a free online compressor, which is a third party you know nothing about receiving a document with your name, date of birth, hospital number and diagnosis on it.
MiniPx cannot do that. Compression runs inside your browser using the same rendering engine that displays the image. There is no upload step, no server-side processing and no copy retained anywhere, because the file never travels. You can verify this: load the page, disconnect from the internet, and compress — it still works.
Use Gentle, not Smart, on documents
Most guidance on this site pushes you toward the Smart preset. Medical documents are the exception. A discharge summary, a pathology report or a prescription is small dark text on white — precisely the content JPEG handles worst. Compress it hard and the characters develop a grey halo, decimal points blur, and a dosage becomes ambiguous.
An unreadable digit on a prescription is not a cosmetic problem. Use the Gentle preset, keep the width at 2000 px or more, and zoom into the smallest text in the result before you send it. If the file is still too large after that, reduce the number of pages per image rather than the quality.
Scans, X-rays and what compression is not for
An X-ray, CT or MRI supplied by a hospital is normally DICOM, not a photograph. DICOM carries calibrated greyscale data and a patient header, and radiologists read it in a viewer with windowing controls. Converting it to a compressed JPEG produces something a doctor can glance at but not something anyone should report from — the diagnostic dynamic range is gone.
So: compress the JPEG or PDF-page images of reports, letters, prescriptions and photographs of physical documents. Send actual imaging as the DICOM your hospital gave you, through the channel your clinician asks for. If you are photographing a printed film with a phone because that is the only copy you have, use Gentle and the highest width you can — and say what it is when you send it.
Portal limits and the practical route
Patient portals, insurer forms and hospital intake systems all impose upload caps, and they differ — this page will not quote a figure, because the one that matters is the one on the form in front of you. What is consistent is the cause of failure: a phone photo of an A4 document is 4–12 MB, and almost every portal wants something far smaller.
Photograph the page square-on in good light, crop to the paper edges, compress at Gentle and 2000 px, and check the smallest print is still legible. That routine clears most portals while keeping the document usable at the other end.
One more privacy note: a phone photo carries EXIF metadata, which can include the location where it was taken. Compressing the image here writes a fresh file rather than passing the original through, so that metadata does not travel with it.
Related: the same documents attached to a claim · other credential scans that must stay legible
Hospital portals frequently want a single PDF rather than separate images. Compressing the PDF itself keeps the pages together and the text selectable, which matters when a clinician needs to search it.