ExactImage

Compress an image to 100 KB

The web's most common ceiling — and the point where compression stops costing you anything you can see.

Drop an image here, or click to choose one

You can also paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. JPG, PNG, WebP.

Target file size
Network measuring… Your file never leaves this device

Every byte of that work happened on your own machine. Verify it: open DevTools → Network, and use the tool. No request carries your image, because none is made.

The limit that quality survives

One hundred kilobytes is the sweet spot of the whole exercise. It is small enough that a raw phone photo will never fit — those run from two to eight megabytes — and large enough that a sensibly sized version fits without visible loss. A 1200 × 900 photograph at 100 KB typically lands around quality 80, which is the region where JPEG artefacts stay below the threshold most people notice on a screen.

Why so many forms chose this number

It is not arbitrary. A 100 KB cap on a system with a hundred thousand users is ten gigabytes of storage, which was a meaningful budget when most of these forms were written and remains a convenient round figure. It also happens to be about the point where an image loads instantly on a slow connection, which is why content management systems and web publishing guidelines converged on the same number from a completely different direction.

Using it for web pages, not just forms

If you are compressing for a website rather than a form, 100 KB is a good default for a full-width hero image and generous for anything smaller. Page-speed tooling will generally stop complaining about an image once it is under this figure. The one change worth making: switch the output to WebP. Every browser in current use supports it, it is meaningfully smaller at the same quality, and unlike a government portal your own website will not reject the format.

Other targets

Compress to 20 KBThe tightest limit you are likely to meet. The tool shrinks dimensions rather than destroying quality, so the result stays readable.Compress to 50 KBTight, but workable. At 50 KB a properly cropped portrait still looks like a proper photograph.Compress to 200 KBRoom to keep real detail. At 200 KB you can hold document scans and text legibly, not just faces.Compress to 500 KBA generous ceiling. Most photos reach it with quality losses you would need to go looking for.Compress to 1 MBThe gentlest common limit. Usually a matter of trimming excess rather than making sacrifices.Resize to exact pixelsSet width and height directly

Questions about 100 KB

Will 100 KB look noticeably worse than the original?
On a screen, at normal viewing size, usually not. Compression artefacts at this budget concentrate in fine texture and sharp colour edges — hair, foliage, text in the image. Skin, sky and plain backgrounds survive almost untouched. If you zoom to 200% you will find the damage; nobody assessing your form will.
Can I use this for website images?
Yes, and it is a good default. Choose WebP rather than JPEG for a website — all current browsers support it and you will get the same appearance in noticeably fewer bytes. Keep JPEG for anything being uploaded to a system you do not control.
Does compressing remove the location data from my photo?
Yes. The output is re-encoded from the raw pixels, so EXIF metadata — camera model, timestamp, and GPS coordinates if your phone recorded them — is not carried into the new file. That is worth knowing before you post a photo taken at home.