Compress Image to 1 MB
Drop any photo, screenshot or scan and it comes back as a JPEG under 1 MB — at the highest quality that still fits. The whole search runs in your browser.
Where 1 MB comes from
1 MB is the ceiling that mail servers, ticketing systems and web forms settle on when they want to stop people attaching raw camera files without making the limit hurt. It is also the point at which the question inverts: instead of asking what has to be given up, the honest answer is usually nothing you can see.
What it costs to get under 1 MB
A 12-megapixel photo generally reaches 1 MB at quality 85 or above, full resolution, which is the same setting most cameras use to write the JPEG in the first place. A file that is already under the ceiling is only re-encoded if doing so genuinely makes it smaller; where it would not, the original comes straight back, because a compressor that hands you a larger file has failed at the one thing it is for.
Why this one is different
Hitting an exact ceiling takes eight to ten trial encodes. A hosted compressor pays for every one of them on every visitor, so it guesses a quality once and hands back whatever that produced. This one runs the search properly, because the processor it runs on is yours.
Compress to a different size
Change the format instead
Questions
How do I compress an image to 1 MB?
Drop your images onto the box above. Each one is re-encoded as a JPEG that lands under 1 MB, using the highest quality that still fits, and the row underneath says what quality that was and whether the image had to be resized. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.
My photo is already under 1 MB — what does this do?
As little as possible. It encodes at the top of the quality range, compares the result against the file you dropped, and gives you back whichever is smaller — which for an already-small file is usually the original, untouched. Where the re-encode does win, it tends to win because the original was carrying an EXIF block, which this drops.
What about a 48-megapixel photo?
Those need resizing to reach 1 MB, and the row will say so. If the destination is a screen, that is no loss at all: 48 megapixels is more than four times what a 4K display can show.
Do my files get uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything happens in this tab. Your files are never sent to a server, which is why this still works if you disconnect from the network after the page has loaded — and why there is no limit on how many you put through it.