Compress Image to 20 KB
Drop any photo, screenshot or scan and it comes back as a JPEG under 20 KB — at the highest quality that still fits. The whole search runs in your browser.
Where 20 KB comes from
20 KB is a registration-form number. It turns up next to fields marked "photograph" or "signature" on exam boards, government portals and bank KYC pages, and it is small enough that the form is quietly assuming you are uploading something that was never a full-size camera photo in the first place — a cropped headshot a few hundred pixels across, or a scan of a signature on white paper.
What it costs to get under 20 KB
Quality is spent first, then pixels. A signature scan or a cropped headshot of around 400 px usually lands under 20 KB on quality alone and keeps its dimensions. A 12-megapixel photo straight off a phone cannot: there is no quality setting that fits four thousand pixels of width into 20 KB, so it gets scaled down — often to a quarter of its width — and the row tells you exactly what it did. Crop to the face before you compress and you keep far more of it.
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 20 KB?
Drop your images onto the box above. Each one is re-encoded as a JPEG that lands under 20 KB, 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.
Why does it look soft at this size?
At 20 KB a photograph gets roughly one byte for every eight pixels, and detail is the first thing to go. The tool spends the budget in the order that hurts least — quality before resolution — but at this ceiling something visible has to give.
The form wants 20 KB and exact dimensions
This page controls the file size, not the pixel dimensions. Crop the image to the dimensions the form asks for first, then drop it here; anything already at the right size will keep it, because resizing only starts once quality has bottomed out.
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.