ImageInKB

Compress an image to 20 KB

This is the tightest limit forms commonly ask for, and the one where a careless compressor gives you an unusable photo. The target below is set to 20 KB — 20 480 bytes — and the tool keeps as much of the picture as that budget allows.

Your photo never leaves this tab. The resizing happens inside your own browser — nothing is uploaded to us, and we cannot see the file.

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JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MB. On a phone you can shoot it now.

Buy back quality before you compress

At 20 KB the bytes are spent on area. Halve the number of pixels and you have roughly twice the budget for each one that remains — which is why cropping beats every quality setting. Do these in order, and compress last.

  1. 1

    Crop to what is being checked

    For a portrait that is head and shoulders, nothing more. Walls, furniture and the rest of the room cost exactly as much per pixel as the face does.

  2. 2

    Prefer a plain background

    JPEG stores smooth areas almost for free and busy texture expensively. A patterned curtain behind you can cost more bytes than your face does.

  3. 3

    Then set the target

    With a tight crop the search usually reaches 20 KB on quality alone, and your photo keeps its original pixel dimensions.

If your form allows more room, there are ready pages for 50 KB and 100 KB, or set any number on the main tool.

Working inside 20 KB

Will a face still be recognisable at 20 KB?
Usually yes, provided the frame is mostly face. Twenty kilobytes spent on a head-and-shoulders crop is a reasonable budget; the same 20 KB spread across a full-length photo in a busy room is not. What ruins these images is almost never the limit itself — it is uncropped background.
The tool reduced my pixel size. Is that allowed?
That depends on your form, and you should check. At this limit, quality alone often cannot get there, so the tool scales the image down 10% at a time and tells you the final dimensions. If the form states minimum pixel dimensions as well as a maximum weight, read both before submitting.
Why does my scanned signature turn into mush?
JPEG is built for photographs, and it damages hard black-on-white edges first — which is exactly what a signature or printed text is. At 20 KB there is little room to protect them. Cropping to just the signature, with no white margin, buys back more than any quality setting will.