How to Use This Tool
Upload forms give you a hard limit and no help meeting it. "Photo must be under 100KB" is a common requirement on job applications, visa portals, government forms and school systems, and the usual response is to compress at 60%, check, compress again at 40%, check again. This tool does that search for you and lands on the highest quality that still fits.
How to use it
Choose a photo or drag one onto the box. Enter the limit you were given and pick the unit. Press Compress. Within a second or two you get a side-by-side comparison, the actual resulting size, and the quality setting that produced it.
Leave shrink dimensions ticked. Quality reduction alone cannot always reach a small target — a 12-megapixel phone photo simply cannot become 50KB at any JPEG quality without turning to mush. When quality alone is not enough, the tool reduces the pixel dimensions in steps and retries, which produces a far better-looking result than crushing the quality to single digits. The stats panel tells you whether it had to do this and what size it settled on.
Which output format to pick
JPEG is the safe default. Every upload form, every printer and every twenty-year-old system accepts it. WebP typically reaches the same visual quality at 25–35% smaller, which means a higher quality setting for the same target — but some government portals and older software still reject it. If the form says "JPG or PNG", use JPEG.
Note that both are lossy. If your source is a PNG screenshot with sharp text, compressing it as JPEG will introduce fringing around the letters. For that kind of image, WebP is noticeably better, and reducing the dimensions is better still.
Two things worth knowing
- Metadata is removed. Re-encoding through a canvas discards EXIF, which means the GPS coordinates and camera details in the original are gone from the output. For an upload form that is a privacy improvement rather than a loss.
- Nothing is uploaded. The file is read by your browser and processed in memory. There is no server involved, which is why it works on aeroplane wifi and why you can safely compress a passport photo or a medical document here.