Compress a JPG to 100 KB
Get any JPG under 100 KB for a profile picture, a listing or an application form. Squishly first tries a lower JPG quality on its own; if the file is still too big, it lowers quality and size together in small steps until it fits, and it all happens on your device.
How to compress a JPG to 100 KB
Where 100 KB matters
A 100 KB limit turns up in many small places: profile and avatar uploads, product photos on some marketplaces, school and club portals, and online forms that ask for a recent photo. It is also a sensible size for a picture you embed in an email newsletter or a simple web page, where a 3 MB photo would make the page slow to open.
JPG is the right format for all of these, because it is built for photos and every system accepts it. The job is only to bring the file size down to the limit without making the picture look worse than it needs to.
A limit like this is also a hint about how the picture will be shown. A site that caps uploads at 100 KB is rarely going to display the photo larger than a phone screen, often much smaller, as a thumbnail or a profile circle. That makes it worth framing the photo for small display before you compress: crop in close on the subject, so the part that matters fills the frame and keeps its detail when the file is squeezed.
How the JPG gets to 100 KB
JPG has a quality setting, and that setting is the main lever. Squishly first saves your JPG again at a good quality setting. If the copy is already under 100 KB, that is the result, at the full original width and height. If not, the tool keeps saving it, lowering the quality a little each time and, because the file was over the limit, shrinking the width and height by 5 percent per pass, until it fits.
Medium sized photos, such as a 1200 pixel picture saved from a website, often fit after a few passes with hardly any visible change. A full resolution phone photo has to give up more, and usually ends up a good deal smaller in pixels. That is still plenty for a screen. If you need the full pixel size, for printing for example, a 100 KB limit is simply the wrong target and the photo size reducer is a better fit.
The detail line under each file tells you what happened: Under 100 KB when the target is met, or the smallest size reached if not. Your original JPG is never overwritten.
Getting a stubborn JPG under 100 KB
A few JPGs resist: very detailed scenes like foliage, crowds or gravel, and large scans of printed pages. If the result says Smallest possible, crop the photo to the part that matters with the crop tool and run it again. Cutting away a busy background is the fastest way to win back kilobytes.
If what you have is actually a PNG, for example a screenshot saved with a .png name, turn it into a JPG first with the PNG to JPG converter, then compress it here. And if your limit is even lower, the resize to 50 KB page takes the same approach further, with tips for signatures and ID photos.