Under the limit, and still clear.
Compress a photo to 50 KB, 100 KB or any size a form asks for, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the result says how close it looks.
By Suraj Kumar5 min read
A form says the photo must be under 50 KB, and the one on your phone is 4 MB. Most of those megabytes are detail the form will never show. This guide goes through getting a picture under a limit with the KeepSimp image compressor, which works in your browser, so the photo is never uploaded.
Turn on Must be under a size.
Open the image compressor and choose, drop or paste a photo. Under Must be under a size?, turn the switch on and pick a limit: 2 MB, 1 MB, 500 KB and 200 KB are there at once, and Other takes any figure, such as 100, 50 or 20 KB.
That switch is the same as Target size under More options. It looks for the highest quality that still fits, so you lose as little as the limit takes. Turn it off and the quality goes back to what you said the photo was for.
How it gets under the limit.
The only way to know what a file will weigh is to write it. So the compressor writes the picture at a few quality levels, measures each file, and keeps the best one that fits.
When quality alone cannot get there, it makes the picture smaller, each step 85% of the width and height before, and tries again. The result then says so, with the new size in pixels. You can turn that off under More options with Allow smaller dimensions, when a form asks for exact pixels.
Some limits cannot be met. If the smallest file it could make is still over, the page says that plainly and suggests a bigger limit or a smaller size. Nothing is handed over as fitting when it does not.
Fewer pixels is the gentle way.
A photo from a phone is often 4,000 pixels wide. Squeezed into 50 KB at that size, it turns to blocks. The same photo at 600 or 800 pixels wide fits easily and looks clean, because the form shows it small anyway.
Under More options, Size takes a percentage, a long edge or an exact width and height. Set the size first, then the limit: the compressor then spends the limit on the pixels you keep.
Size: long edge 800 px
File type: JPEG
Must be under a size: Other, 50 KBChoose JPEG for forms.
WebP and AVIF are often smaller, but many forms accept only JPG or JPEG. Under More options, choose JPEG as the file type when you are not sure. A picture with see-through parts gets a background in JPEG, white unless you choose another colour.
A screenshot or a scan of text keeps its edges better than a photo does at the same size, because the compressor judges flat pictures by their weakest areas, so letters stay readable.
Read the result, then look.
The result is said in words first: the new size, the old one, and how close it looks. Looks the same to the eye and Very close to the original come from a measured similarity score; when the score is lower, the page says some fine detail is softer. Drag the divider across the picture and zoom in on faces and lettering before you download.
KeepSimp counts a KB as 1,024 bytes. Some forms count 1,000, so if a file of exactly 50 KB is refused, set the limit a little lower. A form that asks for at least so many KB is a different problem: the compressor keeps files under a limit and never pads them up. Choose Printing or keeping, or more pixels, to make a file larger.
Further reading
Topics: compress image to 50kb · compress jpeg to 100kb · compress image to 20kb · reduce image size in kb · compress image to 200kb · compress image to 1mb · image compressor online · no upload
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