The present disclosure provides an image compression method and system. The method includes: receiving, by an access server, an image compression request submitted by a terminal; selecting, by the access server according to the image compression request's time information, an image compression server whose load is lower than a preset threshold, and sending the image compression request to the selected image compression server; compressing, by the selected image compression server, the images according to the image compression request, saving the compressed images, and forwarding URL addresses of the compressed images to the access server; and forwarding, by the access server, the URL addresses to the terminal. In the present disclosure, an image compression system processes an image compression request of a terminal, and performs load balancing automatically according to the load of various image compression servers in the system, thereby implementing automatic processing of mass images of the terminal.