According to the invention, a method is provided for the compression of image data, comprising: dividing an image which is to be compressed into a plurality of image sections; determining, for each image section, a compression method from a plurality of compression methods, by means of predetermined parameters; and compressing the image data of each image section by means of the respectively determined compression method. By dividing an image which is to be compressed into a plurality of areas or sections, a suitable compression method can be allocated to each image section. In particular, the plurality of compression methods comprises a lossless compression method and a lossy compression method. For image sections which consist predominantly of text, a lossless compression method is selected. For image sections which consist predominantly of graphic representations, a lossy compression method is selected.