Government portals, job applications, exam registrations and visa forms often say something like "photo must be under 50 KB". This tool hits that number for you: pick the target size and it finds the highest quality that still fits.
How to compress an image to a specific size
- Choose a target — 20 KB, 50 KB, 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB — or type an exact number.
- Choose JPG (accepted everywhere) or WebP (smaller, but some forms reject it).
- Drop your photo in. The result appears immediately with its final size, dimensions and quality.
- Download.
How it works
The tool tries quality levels using a binary search — seven encodes to find the best quality that lands under your target. Only if even low quality is still too big does it start reducing the pixel dimensions, 15% at a time. That order matters: reducing quality a little is barely visible, while shrinking dimensions loses detail you can't get back.
Common size requirements
| Use | Typical limit | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Passport / visa photo | 20–240 KB | Crop to the required ratio first |
| Exam and job forms | 20–100 KB | Signatures often need 10–30 KB |
| Email attachments | 1–5 MB total | Compress each photo to ~500 KB |
| Website images | 100–300 KB | Use WebP if the site supports it |
Why a photo can't always hit a tiny target
A 12-megapixel phone photo is 3–5 MB. Getting it to 20 KB means throwing away over 99% of the data, so the tool has to shrink it to roughly 400×300 pixels. For ID photos that's fine — forms usually ask for small dimensions anyway. If a form specifies pixel dimensions as well as size, resize to those dimensions first, then compress.
Privacy
Your photo is processed by your browser's own image encoder. It is never uploaded, which matters for ID photos and signatures.
On your phone?
ShrinkForge is the Android version: compress to a target size (100 KB, 250 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB or your own), resize, convert, and batch a whole selection — with no Android permissions and no internet access at all.
More image tools
- Add Date Stamp to PhotoStamp the date a photo was taken onto the image — glowing orange film-camera digits, a clean white date, or a caption label. Reads the real capture date automatically.
- Add Watermark to PhotosWatermark one photo or a whole batch with your name or logo. Choose position, size, opacity or a tiled pattern, preview live, and download as a zip. Nothing is uploaded.
- EXIF ViewerCheck what hidden data a photo contains before you share it — GPS location on a map, camera, lens, date taken, serial numbers and settings. Private, in-browser EXIF reader.
- HEIC to JPG ConverterConvert iPhone HEIC photos to JPG or PNG in your browser — one file or a whole batch, downloaded as a zip. Private: your photos are never uploaded.