Compress any image to under 100KB entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, everything stays on your device.
Last updated: August 2026
100KB
Exact Target
JPEG, WebP
Output
Smart
Two-stage Algo
Private
No Uploads
Drop image here to compress to 100KB
JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC. All processing stays in your browser.
Want to compare against a different limit? Change the target field above, no need to drop the file in again.
Five steps is all it takes. Everything runs in your browser so there is no waiting for an upload or server processing.
Set your target
The target is pre-set to 100KB. Adjust it to any value if your portal has a different limit.
Drop your image
Drag and drop a JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC or HEIF file onto the tool. No upload happens, the file stays on your device.
Quality search, dimension scaling if needed
The tool runs a quality search first. Only for an unusually detailed image does it also need to reduce pixel dimensions. This runs in a background worker, so the tab stays responsive.
Fine-tune without starting over
Change the target or switch between JPEG and WebP afterward and the tool recompresses automatically.
Download the result
Preview and size stats appear. Download the compressed file immediately.
The 100KB limit is common across a wide range of official upload systems. Phone cameras produce photos of 3 to 8MB by default, which is 30 to 80 times larger than the limit. This tool bridges that gap without requiring any software installation.
Job application portals
Many recruitment platforms cap profile photos and supporting documents at 100KB.
University admission forms
Student portal photo uploads typically require under 100KB to fit the system's constraints.
Government online forms
Passport photo uploads, ID submissions and license applications commonly require 100KB or less.
Professional membership applications
Industry bodies and certification portals often impose this limit on member photographs.
You've filled out the form, written the cover letter, gathered the documents. Then you hit the photo upload field and get a generic error: "File size exceeds the maximum limit." No explanation of what the limit actually is. No suggestion for how to fix it. Just a red message and a blocked submission. This happens to thousands of people every day on job portals, government forms, and university admission systems, and most of them have no idea why.
The 100KB limit exists because these systems were often built on older infrastructure where database storage was expensive and upload processing was slow. The engineers who built them set conservative file size caps that made sense at the time, and those limits never got updated even as phone cameras went from 2 megapixels to 50. Your phone doesn't know you're about to upload to a government portal. It just saves the best photo it can, and that photo is almost always between 2MB and 8MB. That's 20 to 80 times over the limit before you've even started.
This is the part that surprises people. A profile photo displayed at 200 by 200 pixels on a job portal needs very little data to look sharp. Even displayed at 400 by 400, a well-compressed 100KB JPEG is genuinely indistinguishable from a 3MB original. The quality loss only becomes visible at large print sizes or extreme digital zoom, neither of which any portal is doing with your photo.
The one situation where 100KB gets genuinely tight is a very high-resolution image with complex detail, like a scanned document or a photo taken in RAW mode. In those cases the tool steps the pixel dimensions down in stages, alongside adjusting quality, which keeps the output clean rather than introducing blocky JPEG artifacts. Once a result appears, changing the target size or output format recompresses automatically using the same cached image, useful if you want to compare 100KB against a looser target like 200KB.
If you're on an iPhone and your upload keeps failing even after you've tried to compress it, the issue might not be the file size at all. iPhones save photos in HEIC format by default, a format that most portals flat-out don't accept. The portal rejects it before it even checks the file size, and you get the same unhelpful error message either way.
The fix is to convert to JPEG first. This tool decodes HEIC and HEIF natively, so it handles that automatically when you drop in a file, converting and compressing in a single pass and outputting a standard JPEG under 100KB. If you want to fix the format issue separately first, the HEIC to JPG converter handles that on its own. Either way, output as JPEG when submitting to official portals. It's the one format every system accepts without question.
Choosing JPEG for a transparent scan
If the source PNG has a transparent background, JPEG will fill it with a solid color. The tool warns about this and offers a one-click switch to WebP, which keeps transparency.
Expecting dimension scaling to happen at 100KB
It rarely does. A 100KB target gives quality reduction alone enough room for almost any phone photo, dimension scaling here mostly shows up for scanned documents or unusually high-resolution sources.
Outputting WebP for a portal that only accepts JPEG
Government and job portals were almost always built around JPEG specifically. If a submission gets rejected and the reason isn't clear, switching the output format to JPEG is the first thing to try.
Assuming the encoder is capped somewhere below 100
It isn't. The search checks quality 100 as a fast path before doing anything else, and for a simple enough image at a 100KB target, that full-quality encode can already fit.
Re-dropping the file just to compare a different target
That's no longer necessary. Changing the target size field after a result already appears recompresses automatically using the same cached image.
Ignoring the warning that the target wasn't fully reached
Rare at 100KB, but for a very detailed source image the tool may not hit the target at an acceptable quality. When this happens it still delivers its best attempt but flags it on the result panel.
Most government portals, job application systems and university submission forms set a 100KB limit on uploaded images to keep database storage manageable and ensure fast processing. The limit is common for profile photos, scanned signatures and supporting documents. The system rejects files that exceed the limit regardless of how the image looks.
For most photographs taken with a phone, compressing to 100KB produces a result that is visually acceptable at the sizes these portals display images. A 3MB phone photo can typically be compressed to 100KB with no visible degradation at normal viewing sizes. Very large, high-resolution images may show slight compression at 100KB.
It checks the extremes first. It tries the lowest quality setting, to confirm 100KB is reachable at all, then tries the highest quality setting, since if that already fits under 100KB there's no need to search further. If neither extreme resolves it, it binary searches the range between them, narrowing in on the highest quality that still fits under 100KB. If even the lowest quality setting overshoots 100KB, the tool steps the pixel dimensions down in stages rather than scaling continuously, re-running the quality search at each smaller size.
There's no artificial ceiling, the search can use any quality from 1 to 100. At a 100KB target, a typical phone photo usually lands somewhere in the middle to upper range, simpler images like graphics or screenshots can sometimes reach quality 100 directly if they already fit under the target at full quality.
Rarely. The tool always tries quality reduction first. Only for a very high-resolution or highly detailed source image, like a scanned document or a photo shot in RAW mode, does it step the pixel dimensions down, roughly 75%, 50%, 35%, 25% and then 15% of the original size, re-running the quality search at each smaller size.
JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and HEIF are all supported as input. The output is JPEG or WebP depending on your selection, never PNG. JPEG is the safest choice for submission portals as it is universally accepted.
Yes. The tool keeps the decoded image cached, so adjusting the target size field or clicking JPEG or WebP after a result already appears triggers an automatic recompress rather than asking you to drop the file in again.
No. The quality search runs in a background Web Worker rather than on the page's main thread, so the tab stays responsive even while a large source photo compresses.
JPEG has no alpha channel, so a transparent PNG compressed with JPEG selected has its transparent areas filled with a solid color instead. If the tool detects transparency and JPEG is selected, it shows a warning with a one-click button to switch to WebP, which keeps transparency intact.
No. The image is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded during compression, so EXIF metadata, including GPS location and camera details, does not carry over to the compressed file.
No. Decoding uses the Canvas API, or a dedicated decoder for HEIC and HEIF files, and the compression itself runs via WebAssembly in a background Web Worker. All of this happens entirely in your browser. Your image never leaves your device, you can verify this by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads, the tool still works.
No, this tool handles one image at a time. For a batch of files that all need to fit the same limit, run each one through individually.
No sign-up. No uploads. Drop your image above and download the compressed version in seconds.
