Compress Image to 20 KB

Shrink a photo or signature to 20 KB

20 KB (fixed on this page)
No image selected yet. Pick an image and press the button - this page is fixed at 20 KB, the limit exam portals and online application forms most often set for passport photos and signature scans.

Compression happens entirely in your browser - your image is never uploaded to a server.

Twenty kilobytes is one of the strictest photo limits on the internet. Competitive-exam portals, university admission forms, government job applications and bank forms routinely refuse any photo or signature scan larger than 20 KB - and a normal phone photo is a hundred times bigger than that. This page exists for exactly that moment: it is locked to a 20 KB target, so there is nothing to set up and nothing to get wrong at the last minute before a deadline.

The tool re-saves your picture as a JPEG again and again, testing quality levels and slightly reducing the dimensions until the file fits under the limit with the best quality it can manage. At 20 KB a large photo will look softer than the original - that is plain physics, not a fault - but faces and signatures stay perfectly readable, which is all these forms actually check. Everything happens in your browser, so your ID photo or signature image is never uploaded to any server.

How to use

  1. Click the file box and choose the photo or signature scan you need to shrink.
  2. Check the target line: this page always aims for under 20 KB.
  3. Press the Compress to 20 KB button and wait a moment while quality levels are tested.
  4. Read the result line - it shows the new file size plus the quality and dimensions scale used.
  5. Check the preview, then click Download Image to save the finished JPEG.

Frequently asked questions

Will the result be exactly 20 KB?

It will be just under 20 KB, and that is deliberate. Upload forms reject files that are even slightly over the limit, so the tool keeps the highest quality that stays safely below 20 KB rather than landing exactly on it.

Why do forms tell me to 'compress image to 20 kb'?

That instruction appears on exam and application portals - staff selection, banking and university forms among them - because their systems accept only very small files. When a form tells you to compress image to 20 kb, it almost always means a JPEG photo or signature under that size, which is exactly what this page produces.

My signature scan is still too big. What helps?

Crop the scan tightly around the signature before compressing - blank margins waste most of the bytes. A tight crop on plain white paper compresses far better than a full-page scan, and a tight crop is also what most forms actually want to see.

Are my images uploaded anywhere?

No. The compression runs entirely in your browser on your own device. Your photo or signature never leaves your phone or computer, and nothing is stored anywhere.