Compress Image to 20 KB

How to compress an image to 20 KB

20 KB is small enough that pixel count matters more than the quality slider. A 600 × 600 photo at a sensible JPG quality usually lands between 30 and 60 KB, so reaching 20 KB normally means going down to roughly 350 to 450 pixels on the long side. This page does that for you: it tries the highest quality first and only reduces the dimensions when quality alone cannot get under the limit.

1. Choose or drop one or more images above (on a phone, tap the box to pick from your gallery).
2. Leave the target at 20 KB, or type your form's exact limit into Custom target.
3. Each image is compressed on your device; the result shows its exact size and a green tick when it fits.
4. Download one file, or all of them as a ZIP.

Where the 20 KB limit comes up

Signature scans and tiny application photos. Typical places:

• Signature uploads on exam and job application forms
• Thumbnail and avatar fields with a hard size cap
• Legacy intranet and HR systems with small attachment limits
• Photos embedded in documents that must stay tiny

What fits in 20 KB

Portrait photos usually fit at around 300 × 400 px; a black-ink signature on white fits at 600 px wide or more, because flat white areas compress to almost nothing.

Watch out: Scan a signature in greyscale or pure black and white first. Paper texture and colour noise are what make a signature scan big, not its size in pixels.

How the tool decides

It first tries a high quality at the largest size allowed. If that is too big, it searches for the highest JPG (or WebP) quality that still fits. Only when quality would have to drop below about 50 does it reduce the pixel dimensions instead, because a slightly smaller sharp photo looks better than a full-size blocky one. The target is treated as 20,000 bytes so it passes checks that count a kilobyte as either 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.

Need an exact pixel size too? Resize first with the image resizer or crop with the image cropper, then compress here. For the background on why photos are so large, read the image compression guide or how to reduce image size for email.