Compress JPG to under 100 KB
Squeeze a JPG under 100 KB in your browser.
Make images or PDFs smaller.
- JPG · PNG · WebP · Text · Word
- Word
- PDF · Text
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100 KB is where a JPG starts having a choice
JPEG discards three quarters of the colour information before quality enters the picture at all: colour is stored at half resolution in each direction, because eyes are far better at seeing brightness edges than colour ones. That is why a face or a landscape survives 100 KB far better than a screenshot of red text on white, where the colour edges are the content. For a photograph already at web dimensions the quality search usually settles somewhere in the fifties or sixties and stops there, with no scaling at all, so the file keeps the pixel dimensions it arrived with. A full-resolution camera file exhausts the quality range first and gets scaled once or twice on the way down.
Will a full-size photo fit in 100 KB?
A phone photograph at 4000 pixels wide will not, and the tool will resize it rather than hand you a ruined file. Something already around 1000 to 1200 pixels wide usually does fit at a respectable quality, which is why 100 KB is a workable budget for a web page image and a tight one for anything else. If you control the source, exporting at the width you actually need before you come here gets a much better-looking 100 KB.
Why is 100 KB the number on every application form?
Because it was a reasonable ceiling when those forms were written and nobody has revisited it since. It is common enough on visa, licence and registration systems that it functions as a de facto standard, and it is usually paired with a pixel range and a JPEG-only rule. Read the whole specification before compressing: meeting the byte limit and failing the dimension minimum is the most common way these submissions bounce.
Why does a screenshot look worse than a photo at the same size?
Because a screenshot is the case JPEG handles worst. It stores colour at half resolution and discards fine detail first, which is invisible on skin and foliage and glaring on red text, thin rules and flat blocks of colour. At 100 KB a photograph looks essentially correct while a screenshot of a dialog box looks smeared around every edge. If what you are holding is a screenshot, PNG or WebP will carry it through this budget far better than JPEG can.
More on where 100 KB comes from, and on what compressing JPG actually does.
Should the output stay JPG?
For anything going into a form, yes, and without much thought: the form almost certainly says JPEG somewhere in the small print. For anything going onto a web page, WebP at the same 100 KB looks noticeably cleaner, because it spends the budget better on exactly the smooth gradients JPEG struggles with, and every browser in use has read it for years. Auto compares the two and keeps whichever came out better, so the honest default is to leave the format alone and force JPG only when you know the far end is fussy.
A different budget
The same budget for PNG. With no format in mind, compress any image to 100 KB. With no limit in mind, compress JPG.