Compress an image to 200 KB
Drop a photo and get a copy under 200 KB, ready for a form or portal with a strict file limit. The tool first tries a lower quality alone, and if that is not enough it lowers quality and size together in small steps until the file fits, all inside your browser, so the photo is never uploaded.
How to compress an image to 200 KB
Why so many forms ask for 200 KB
Application portals for visas, exams, job boards and universities often cap each upload at 200 KB. The reason is mostly practical: they store thousands of photos and scans per day, many of them from slow connections, and a small fixed limit keeps their storage and review screens fast. A photo straight from a phone is usually 2 to 5 MB, ten or twenty times over that line, so the form simply rejects it.
The good news is that 200 KB is a generous limit for what these forms need. A face photo, a signature or a scanned certificate looks perfectly clear on a reviewer screen at that size. You are not losing anything the reader will miss; you are removing the extra detail your phone saved for printing a poster.
What happens to the photo at 200 KB
Squishly first saves the image again at a good quality setting. If that copy is already under 200 KB, you get it straight away and the photo keeps its exact width and height. If it is still too big, the tool repeats the save, each time lowering the quality a little and making the picture 5 percent smaller on each side, until the file fits or it runs out of passes.
For most phone photos the result is a copy that looks the same on a laptop screen. Where you might see a difference is in fine texture, like hair, grass or small printed text, which turns slightly softer. Faces, colors and the overall layout stay as they were. The original file on your device is never changed; you always get a new copy to download.
The format stays the same where it can: a JPG comes back as a JPG and a PNG as a PNG. HEIC photos from an iPhone come back as JPG, which is also what most forms want, and an AVIF file comes back as JPG too, because browsers cannot save AVIF at a chosen size.
If the image will not fit under 200 KB
Two kinds of image struggle to reach 200 KB. The first is a PNG of a photo, because PNG is built for flat graphics and stays heavy on photos however hard it is squeezed. Turn it into a JPG first with the PNG to JPG converter, then compress the JPG here. The second is a very large scan with a lot of fine detail, such as a full-page document photographed at high resolution.
For a scan, crop away the table, the background and the margins before compressing. Every pixel you remove is weight the tool no longer has to squeeze, so the text that remains stays sharper. You can do this with the crop tool, then come back and run the cropped copy through this page.
Some forms also ask for a fixed shape, like a square passport photo. Crop to that shape first and compress second, so the size limit is met on the image you are actually going to submit. If a form wants a much smaller file, the resize to 50 KB page goes further.