The evaluation of the suitability of image compression techniques to particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) images is motivated by a conflict between the bandwidth of data transfer and storage systems and the requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of PTV data. In this article the possibilities of lossless compression techniques are outlined and the influence of lossy JPEG and Wavelet algorithm to three-dimensional (3D) PTV particle images is displayed. These PTV images are products of a real experiment where a sequence of 50 time steps was used to derive statistics. It is shown that Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) and Wavelet compression techniques have almost the same impact on particle images; both techniques can be used up to a compression ratio of 10 to 20 at a tolerable loss of data quality. For the lossless case, a compression ratio of 5 can be reached in combination with image preprocessing.