Compress image to 20 KB
At 20 KB dimensions matter more than quality — the tool balances both so the result stays legible.
Updated · Published by Novpix LLC
Drop images here
or click to browse · JPG, PNG, WebP · multiple files supported
Images are processed on your device and never uploaded.
Options
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
How it works
- 1Drop your photo or scan into the box above. If it is a signature, crop away the white margin first — blank paper costs kilobytes too.
- 2Quality is lowered first, then dimensions, and the search stops at the first combination that lands under 20 KB.
- 3Open the result at full size before you submit it. A portrait cropped to head and shoulders survives this target far better than a full-body shot.
Frequently asked questions
- Is 20 KB even realistic for a photo?
- Yes, at modest dimensions. Twenty kilobytes of JPEG data describes an image of roughly 300 × 300 pixels comfortably; spread the same budget over 2000 × 2000 pixels and there is about one byte for every fifty pixels, which is why oversized sources come back blurred. The tool scales down instead of crushing quality, because a sharp small image is more useful than a large smeared one.
- Which upload forms actually demand 20 KB?
- Mostly public-sector systems built when bandwidth was scarce and never revised since: recruitment boards, university entrance portals and civil-service applications commonly specify a photograph of 20–50 KB and a signature of 10–20 KB. The limit is enforced by the form itself, so a file a single kilobyte over is rejected with no explanation.
- My scanned signature still will not fit. What now?
- Signatures compress badly when the scan carries grey paper texture and a wide white border. Crop tightly to the ink, and scan in grayscale rather than colour if your scanner offers it. A tightly cropped grayscale signature normally lands well under 20 KB with room left over.
- Should I choose JPG or PNG for a target this small?
- JPG, unless the image is a line drawing or a flat-colour logo. PNG records every pixel exactly, which is the wrong trade at 20 KB — it can only reach the target by shrinking the picture drastically. JPG discards detail the eye barely registers, so it keeps far more apparent sharpness inside the same budget.
- Does the photo leave my device?
- No. Re-encoding runs in your browser, using the same image engine that draws pictures on this page. Identity photos and signature scans are precisely the files you should not hand to an unfamiliar website — so this tool has no server to hand them to.
About this tool
Twenty kilobytes is the tightest limit you are likely to meet on a real form, and it is almost always attached to an identity document: a passport-style photograph, a scanned signature, a thumbnail for a candidate record. The number is a storage decision made years ago on the other side of the form, and no amount of arguing with the upload button changes it.
The arithmetic explains why these uploads go wrong so often. File size follows pixel count, so a phone photo at 4000 × 3000 pixels starts life several hundred times larger than the target. Reaching 20 KB by quality reduction alone would leave visible blocking across the whole frame. This tool therefore lowers quality only to a sensible floor, then reduces dimensions step by step, and reports the size it actually achieved rather than promising one it did not.
Preparation does more for the result than any setting. Crop before you compress: a head-and-shoulders portrait spends its whole budget on the face, while a full-body shot spends most of it on a wall. Scanned signatures should be cropped to the ink and converted to grayscale. And always start from the original file rather than a screenshot of it, because every earlier save has already spent quality you cannot get back.
Everything happens locally, so nothing is uploaded and no copy is retained anywhere. Your original file is never modified — the download is a new file — which means you can compress, check the result at full size, and try a tighter crop if the face has lost too much detail.