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Byte budget · 20 KB ceiling
Compress an image to 20 KB
Application portals for government exams, banks and universities usually allow a 20 KB photograph and a 10–20 KB signature. A phone camera JPEG is two hundred times that. This tool walks the quality setting down until the file fits, and tells you exactly where it landed.
Result
Getting a form photo under 20 KB that still looks like you
Twenty kilobytes is not much room, so the two levers matter in a particular order. Pixel count comes first. A 20 KB budget spread over a 3000 pixel wide photo gives every block of pixels almost nothing to work with, and the result is the smeared, blocky look people complain about. The same 20 KB spread over a 230 pixel tall photo is comfortable.
Most forms state a pixel size next to the file size, commonly around 200 × 230 for a photograph and 140 × 60 for a signature. Match that first and the file size problem mostly solves itself. Only once the dimensions are right does the quality setting need to do any real work, and this tool searches for the highest quality value that still fits rather than dropping straight to the floor.
Step by step
- Drop your photo or scanned signature into the box above.
- Pick the ceiling your form asks for. Signature fields are often 10 KB, not 20 KB.
- Choose a longest edge. If the form quotes pixel dimensions, use the nearest option.
- Press Compress. The gauge on the right fills up to show how much of your budget the result uses.
- Download, then re-check the form's own limit before you submit.
Signatures need different treatment from photos
A signature is dark ink on white paper, which is exactly the kind of hard-edged content JPEG handles worst. Two things help. Crop tightly, so you are not spending bytes on empty paper around the ink. And keep the strip short, around 60 pixels tall, because a signature carries almost no fine detail worth preserving. If your form accepts PNG, a scanned signature will often come out smaller as a PNG than a JPEG.
Common questions
Will a 20 KB photo look blurry on my application?
At form-sized dimensions, no. Blur happens when a large image is squeezed into a small budget. Resize to the pixel size the form asks for and 20 KB is enough for a perfectly readable head-and-shoulders photo. If you leave the image at full camera resolution and force it to 20 KB, it will look bad, which is why the longest edge control defaults to a form-sized value.
My scanned signature is 4 MB. Is that normal?
Yes. Flatbed scanners default to 300 or 600 DPI across the whole platen, so you end up with a huge image of mostly blank paper. Crop to the ink, set the longest edge to about 140 pixels, and it will drop to a few kilobytes.
Does the form check dimensions as well as file size?
Often, yes, and sometimes it checks a minimum too. Read the instruction page carefully. A typical rule reads "photograph must be 200 x 230 pixels and between 20 KB and 50 KB", which means a file that is too small is also rejected. If you hit that, the increase image size tool pads a file up to a minimum without touching a single pixel.
Can I compress several photos at once?
Not on this page. Each file gets its own quality search, and a shared setting across a mixed batch tends to overshoot on some and waste budget on others. Run them one at a time and you will get a better result on each.
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No. The decoding, resizing and re-encoding all happen in your browser using the canvas API. You can put your device into aeroplane mode after the page has loaded and the tool still works.
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