Compress image to 20 KB

Set the budget, and the encoder is searched for the best quality that fits under 20 KB. On your device — the image is never uploaded.

  • 0 uploads
  • No limits
  • No signup
  • Works offline

Where a 20 KB limit comes from

Nobody chooses 20 KB for fun. If you are here, a form told you to, and the form probably did not explain how. These are the places this particular number turns up:

  • Indian government exam portals (SSC, UPSC, IBPS) for signature and photo fields
  • Some visa application signature uploads
  • Older HR systems with tight per-field caps

A 20 KB budget suits a headshot at roughly 300×400 pixels. Detail in hair and fabric will soften, but a face stays clearly recognisable.

What 20 KB actually buys you

Twenty kilobytes is the classic Indian examination-portal budget, and those forms are unusually specific: they often state a minimum as well as a maximum, and a separate, much smaller cap for the signature field. Read both numbers before you start, because a file that satisfies the ceiling and misses the floor is refused the same way.

At this budget a headshot around 300×400 pixels is the realistic target. Hair, fabric texture and background detail will soften first — which is fine, because none of them is what the photo is for. What has to survive is the face, and cropping tightly is what buys the bytes to keep it.

Workable for ID-style portraits. Crop tight before compressing. The search here spends the budget on dimensions before quality — a larger image at quality 55 beats a smaller one at 95, because the eye forgives artefacts more readily than missing resolution.

Getting a better result

Three things reliably help when the budget is tight:

  • Crop before compressing. Every pixel you keep costs bytes. A tightly framed portrait at 20 KB looks far better than a full-body shot squeezed into the same space. The cropper hands its result straight to this tool.
  • Start from the highest-quality original you have. Compressing an image that has already been through WhatsApp compounds the damage. Go back to the file straight off the camera.
  • Prefer WebP if the form allows it. At the same file size WebP holds noticeably more detail than JPEG. Most official forms still want JPG, but it costs nothing to check.

Other common targets

10 KB · 30 KB · 50 KB · 100 KB · 150 KB · 200 KB · 300 KB · 500 KB

How it works

  1. 01Add your imageDrop it on the page, click to browse, or paste from the clipboard.
  2. 02The 20 KB target is already setYou landed on this page, so the budget is filled in. Change it if you need something different.
  3. 03The search runsThe encoder is run repeatedly, binary-searching quality for the best result that still fits under 20 KB.
  4. 04Compare, then downloadDrag the before/after slider to see what the compression cost before you commit.

Questions people actually ask

The portal wants 20 KB for the photo and 10 KB for the signature. Why the difference?
A signature is line art on white — mostly flat area, very little detail — so it compresses far harder than a face for the same visual result. The two limits are not arbitrary; they reflect what each kind of image actually costs. Scan the signature in greyscale and the smaller budget stops being tight.
Will my photo still look acceptable at 20 KB?
A 20 KB budget suits a headshot at roughly 300×400 pixels. Detail in hair and fabric will soften, but a face stays clearly recognisable. Workable for ID-style portraits. Crop tight before compressing.
Is the result exactly 20 KB?
It lands within about 5% below 20 KB, and never above it. Going over would defeat the point — a form that says "maximum 20 KB" rejects a file of 21 KB without explanation.
Is my image uploaded to reach 20 KB?
No. Every encode in the search runs on your own device, in a background thread, using WebAssembly builds of MozJPEG and libwebp.