Compress an Image to 100 KB
The most-asked-for limit on the internet, and the point where a photograph starts looking like a photograph again.
Runs on your device — photos are never uploadedDrop your images here
or click to browse — as many as you like
JPG · PNG · WebP · HEIC
75% is the usual sweet spot for photographs. Below about 50 the edges start to smear.
The tool hunts for the quality that lands there. Government forms commonly cap uploads at 500 KB or 1 MB.
JPG opens absolutely everywhere. The safe choice for photos.
Resizing shrinks a file far more than quality does. A phone photo is often 4000 px wide when 1600 would do.
Every image is decoded in memory, so a hundred phone photos at once will strain a phone. Work in batches of a few dozen if it slows down.
How it works
Three steps, no account, and the photos never leave your computer.
Drop the images in
JPG, PNG, WebP or an iPhone HEIC. Several at once is fine — each one is compressed to the same limit independently.
The target is already set to 100 KB
Change it if you need a different number. The tool searches for the largest picture that fits underneath, rather than making you guess at a quality dial.
Save
One at a time, or all together as a ZIP. The result line reports the size it reached and the dimensions it settled on.
Where a 100 KB limit comes from
Web pages and blog posts
Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page. Keeping them near 100 KB is the cheapest speed improvement available to most sites.
Job applications and CVs
Portals that cap attachments per file, where a photograph pushes the whole document over the line.
Forum and marketplace listings
Where several images per post are normal and each one is checked against a cap.
Sending several photos at once
Ten images at 100 KB is a megabyte, which every mail system accepts without complaint.
A hundred kilobytes is the useful threshold
One hundred kilobytes is where compression stops being a compromise and starts being maintenance. Below it you are deciding what to sacrifice. At it, most photographs come through at a resolution nobody will question.
In testing against four 12-megapixel images, 100 KB held a portrait at 3,540 pixels wide, an ordinary phone snapshot at 2,198, a scanned page at 1,308, and a dense outdoor scene at 818. Only the last is a real loss, and only if the picture is being printed.
What you get back at 100 KB
| Test image (all 4000 × 3000) | Original | At 100 KB |
|---|---|---|
| A portrait on a plain background smooth skin and an even backdrop, which JPEG stores very cheaply | 1.8 MB | 3540 × 2655 |
| A typical phone snapshot sky, buildings, ground texture — the ordinary case | 2.6 MB | 2198 × 1648 |
| A scanned page of text thousands of hard black-on-white edges, which JPEG handles badly | 1.3 MB | 1308 × 981 |
| A dense outdoor scene foliage, fine detail everywhere, the worst case for any compressor | 3.3 MB | 818 × 613 |
Measured by running this tool's own search against four 12-megapixel test images built to bracket the range from very compressible to barely compressible. Your photograph will land somewhere inside it.
Why this number, and not another
The 100 KB limit is everywhere for a reason that has nothing to do with images. It is a round number that was generous when upload forms were being written and is still comfortable now, so it stuck. Content systems use it, job portals use it, forums use it.
The happy accident is that it is genuinely a good threshold. A hundred kilobytes is small enough to load instantly on a phone connection and large enough that a normal photograph survives with its resolution intact.
If you are compressing for a web page
Keeping images near 100 KB is one of the highest-return things you can do for page speed, because images are usually the largest thing on a page by a wide margin. Two considerations beyond the number itself:
Serve the size you actually display. An image shown 800 pixels wide gains nothing from being 4,000 pixels wide — it costs the visitor bandwidth for detail their screen throws away. The longest-side control handles this.
And prefer WebP where you can. At the same visual quality it is typically 25 to 35% smaller, which at a fixed 100 KB budget means a meaningfully larger picture.
How the tool finds the size
It searches, rather than guessing. Quality is bisected to find the highest setting that still fits, and if no quality setting fits — which is normal at small targets — the picture is scaled down and the search runs again, until the largest version that fits under the limit is found.
That ordering matters. Turning quality to the floor on a full-size image produces something both ugly and, very often, still over the limit. Fewer pixels at a decent quality is the better trade almost every time, and it is the one this tool makes.
If a target genuinely cannot be reached, the result is shown in red with what it missed by, rather than handed back in green as though it had worked.
Nothing is uploaded
The compression happens in your browser, using your own processor. The photograph is never transmitted, which means there is no queue, no file-size ceiling imposed by a server, and no copy of your picture sitting on somebody else's disk afterwards.
It also means the tool works with no connection at all once the page has loaded.
Common questions
Will 100 KB look noticeably worse?
On a screen, usually not. A normal phone photograph came through at 2,198 pixels wide in testing, at a quality level where compression artefacts are not visible at normal viewing distance. Printing is the exception: print wants far more pixels per inch than a screen does.
Can I compress several images to 100 KB at once?
Yes. Drop them all in and each is compressed to the same target independently, then saved individually or together as a ZIP. Every one is processed on your own machine, so a large batch is limited by your computer rather than by an upload.
Does compressing to 100 KB remove EXIF data?
Yes. Re-encoding produces a new file with no metadata carried over, so location, camera model and timestamp are all dropped. That is usually welcome when posting publicly, and worth knowing if you were relying on it.
Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
No. The compression runs in your browser on your own processor, so the image never leaves the machine. There is no queue, no server-side size ceiling, and no copy left behind afterwards.
Can I compress a batch to 100 KB at once?
Yes. Drop in as many as you like and each is compressed to the same target independently, then saved individually or together as a ZIP.
More tools
Every one of them runs on your device. No uploads, no accounts.