Frequently asked questions
Will compressing reduce my image quality?
Some quality is always traded for size, but the tool searches for the highest quality that fits your limit, so you never lose more than necessary. The side-by-side preview lets you check before downloading.
Is my photo uploaded to your server?
No. Compression happens entirely inside your browser using its built-in image engine. Your photo never leaves your device — there is nothing to upload, and nothing for us to store.
What formats can I compress?
JPG, PNG and WebP input. Output is JPG (works everywhere) or WebP (smaller, supported by all modern browsers and portals). PNG output isn't offered because PNG can't hit small size targets for photos.
Why did my image get resized?
If a photo physically can't fit the target at acceptable quality (say, a 6000×4000 photo into 20 KB), the tool gently reduces dimensions too — that's what portals expect and it looks far better than extreme compression artifacts.
Getting a photo under a strict size limit
The reason you're here is almost always the same: a form somewhere says your photo must be "less than 100 KB" (or 50, or 20), and your phone's camera happily produced a 4 MB file. That's a 40-to-1 gap, and dragging a quality slider by hand is a miserable way to close it — you either overshoot and get rejected, or crush the image so hard the face turns to mush.
This tool removes the guesswork. When you set a target, it runs a binary search over JPEG quality — trying a setting, measuring the real output size, adjusting, and repeating — until it finds the highest quality that still fits under your limit. If quality alone can't get there (a very large photo squeezed into 20 KB, for example), it also steps the pixel dimensions down, because a slightly smaller but clean image always looks better than a full-size one riddled with compression blocks.
How to get the best-looking result
- Start from the largest original you have. Compressing an already-compressed screenshot bakes in artefacts. The original camera file gives the tool the most room to work.
- Crop before you compress. If the form wants a passport-style headshot, crop to the face first. Fewer pixels to describe means more quality budget per pixel at the same file size.
- Choose JPG for photos. JPG is what portals expect and it hits small targets far better than PNG. Keep WebP for the web, where every modern browser supports it.
- Check the preview. The before/after view is there so you can confirm the result is acceptable before you download — no surprises at the upload stage.
Common size limits and where they come from
Different portals cap photos at different sizes for historical reasons — usually a database field sized years ago that nobody has revisited. A few you'll meet often: 20 KB for signatures and thumb impressions, 50 KB for passport-size photos on exam and visa forms, 100 KB for job-portal and admission uploads, and 200 KB for résumé photos and marketplace listings. If your exact number isn't a preset, just type it into the box — any value from 5 KB upward works.
Is it private?
Yes, completely. The image is decoded and re-encoded by your browser's own graphics engine. It is never uploaded, so there is nothing for us to store and nothing that could leak. That makes the tool safe for ID photos and signatures, which is exactly the kind of file people are most often compressing.
Need the file smaller in a different way, or need a different format? You can convert between JPG, PNG and WebP, turn a batch of photos into a single PDF, or head straight to a size preset below.