We propose EdgeCS—an edge guided compressive sensing reconstruction approach—to recover images of higher quality from fewer measurements than the current methods. Edges are important image features that are used in various ways in image recovery, analysis, and understanding. In compressive sensing, the sparsity of image edges has been successfully utilized to recover images. However, edge detectors have not been used on compressive sensing measurements to improve the edge recovery and subsequently the image recovery. This motivates us to propose EdgeCS, which alternatively performs edge detection and image reconstruction in a mutually beneficial way. The edge detector of EdgeCS is designed to faithfully return partial edges from intermediate image reconstructions even though these reconstructions may still have noise and artifacts. For complex-valued images, it incorporates joint sparsity between the real and imaginary components. EdgeCS has been implemented with both isotropic and anisotropic discretizations of total variation and tested on incomplete k-space (spectral Fourier) samples. It applies to other types of measurements as well. Experimental results on large-scale real/complex-valued phantom and magnetic resonance (MR) images show that EdgeCS is fast and returns high-quality images. For example, it exactly recovers the 256×256 Shepp–Logan phantom from merely 7 radial lines (3.03% k-space), which is impossible for most existing algorithms. It is able to accurately reconstruct a 512 × 512 MR image with 0.05 white noise from 20.87% radial samples. On complex-valued MR images, it obtains recoveries with faithful phases, which are important in many medical applications. Each of these tests took around 30 seconds on a standard PC. Finally, the algorithm is GPU friendly.