How to Get an Image Under 200 KB, 500 KB or 1 MB

To get a typical phone or camera photo under a size limit, first reduce its pixel width, then adjust quality. In our tests, an ordinary photo saved as JPEG at quality 75 fit under 200 KB at 1,600 pixels wide, under 500 KB at 2,048 pixels (quality 85), and under 1 MB at 3,000 pixels (quality 85). Photos full of fine detail, like foliage or gravel, need to go smaller than that.

The rest of this guide shows the measurements those numbers come from, explains why resizing beats cranking quality down, and covers the traps: forms that count kilobytes differently, images that refuse to shrink, and files that get worse every time they are re-saved.

Why pixel size matters more than quality

File size follows the number of pixels, and the number of pixels grows with the square of the width. Halve the width and you keep only a quarter of the pixels. Our landscape photo shows it neatly: at quality 85 it was 1,078 KB at 4,000 pixels wide and 245 KB at 2,048 pixels, roughly half the width for 23% of the bytes.

Quality works the other way round. Squeezing the same 4,000-pixel image down to quality 60 only got it to 419 KB, still more than double a 200 KB limit, and at that setting smooth areas such as sky are where compression artefacts show first. Most upload forms and web pages will display the picture at well under 2,000 pixels anyway, so the extra width you are paying for is never seen.

The measurements

We took four public-domain photos and one screenshot, scaled each to a series of maximum widths in a browser canvas, and exported JPEG and WebP at four quality levels, using the same canvas encoder an in-browser compressor uses. The full grid for the landscape photo is below; the photo started at 4,886×3,236 pixels and 7,984 KB as downloaded.

Reading down any column, each step down in width cuts the file by roughly a third or more. Reading across a row, the jump from quality 85 to 95 more than doubles it. That asymmetry is the whole strategy in one table.

Largest width that fits each limit

For every test image, this is the widest of our tested sizes (4,000, 3,000, 2,048, 1,600, 1,280, 1,024 and 800 pixels) that came in under the limit at quality 85. "Full size" means the image fit without any resizing; "or more" means it still fit at the largest width we tried.

The bark close-up is the outlier. Every square millimetre of it is sharp, random detail, which is the hardest possible content for a compressor, so even at 800 pixels and quality 85 it weighed 329 KB. It only dropped under 200 KB at quality 60 (189 KB as JPEG). If your image looks like that, go below 800 pixels or accept the lower quality; there is no free lunch.

A step-by-step recipe

1. Crop first. Anything you cut away is data you never have to compress. Trimming a wide shot to the subject often saves more than any setting.
2. Pick a starting width from the target. For an ordinary photo: about 1,600 px for 200 KB, 2,048 px for 500 KB, 3,000 px for 1 MB.
3. Export at quality 80 to 85. Check the result against the limit.
4. Still too big? Step the width down once more (for example from 2,048 to 1,600) before touching quality.
5. Only then lower quality, in steps of five, and stop at around 70 for anything people will look at closely.
6. Consider WebP if the destination accepts it: at the same quality it often fit a width one or two steps larger than JPEG did, on three of our four photos.

Common snags

What counts as a kilobyte?

Some systems mean 1,000 bytes by "KB", others mean 1,024. The difference is small (a 200 KB limit is either 200,000 or 204,800 bytes) but it is enough to reject a file that looks fine on your computer. Aim a few percent under the limit, and every width we recommend above already stays below the stricter 1,000-byte definition.

The file got bigger after "compressing"

This happens when the source was already small, or when you convert a lean PNG screenshot through a canvas. The browser encoder we tested turned a 296 KB screenshot into a 445 KB PNG at the same pixel size. If the output is larger than the input, just keep the input.

Repeated saving

Every lossy save discards a little more detail, and artefacts from one round get compressed again in the next. If you need several sizes, make each one from the original rather than from the previous, smaller copy.

Pixel limits as well as byte limits

Some forms also set a minimum or maximum pixel size, for example an application form that asks for a photo of at least 600 × 600 pixels. Resize to satisfy the pixel rule first, then tune quality to meet the byte rule. Our guide on what pixel size an image should be covers typical dimensions for screens, email and print.

Test images

Measured on 28 September 2026 with the canvas toBlob() encoder of a current desktop browser (engine version 150, headless). Photos are CC0 files from Wikimedia Commons, used for measurement only and not republished here.