ExactImage

Compress an image to 1 MB

The gentlest common limit. Usually a matter of trimming excess rather than making sacrifices.

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.

Barely a compression job at all

A one-megabyte ceiling rarely requires any visible compromise. Most phone photographs are between two and eight megabytes, so reaching 1 MB means discarding somewhere between half and seven-eighths of the file — and because JPEG's size-to-quality curve is steeply non-linear, that last doubling of file size was buying almost nothing visible in the first place. Expect quality around 90 and an image indistinguishable from the original on any screen.

Where a 1 MB limit comes from

Forums, ticketing systems, wikis, older content management systems, and issue trackers. These limits were usually set to stop people attaching video files and raw camera output, not to force real compression. You are being asked to be reasonable, not to make sacrifices.

When 1 MB is still not enough

The one case where this limit bites is a very high-resolution image with a lot of fine detail — a panorama, a detailed scan, a screenshot of dense text at 4K. There, the honest answer is often to reduce dimensions deliberately rather than let the encoder fight to preserve detail at a size it cannot afford. The resize tool lets you set the pixel dimensions directly, which for text-heavy screenshots produces a far cleaner result than compression alone.

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 100 KBThe web's most common ceilingCompress 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.Resize to exact pixelsSet width and height directly

Questions about 1 MB

My screenshot will not compress well. Why?
Screenshots are the worst case for JPEG. The format was designed for photographs — smooth gradients and organic texture — and it handles the sharp, high-contrast edges of text and interface chrome badly, producing visible ringing around every letter. For screenshots, use PNG if size allows, or reduce the dimensions rather than the quality.
Should I just resize instead of compressing?
Often, yes. If the image will be displayed at 1000 pixels wide, storing it at 4000 wide is spending four times the pixels on detail nobody sees. Resizing to the display size and then compressing lightly gives a better-looking result at the same file size than compressing a full-resolution image hard.
Does this work on very large images?
Up to a point. Decoding a very large image consumes memory proportional to its pixel count, and phones will run out well before desktops do. Images beyond roughly 50 megapixels may fail on mobile — that is a browser memory limit, not a limit of the tool.