Photo Size ReducerPicture the situation. You are halfway through an online form for an exam or a job. Name, number, address, all done. Then the last field asks for a passport style photo, and the small print says the file must be under 20 KB. Your phone photo is 3.4 MB. That is about 170 times too big.
The first thing most people try is sending the picture to themselves in a chat app, hoping the app shrinks it. It does, but the result is usually a soft, blocky mess at a size nobody chose. The second attempt is a screenshot of the photo. That can be even larger than the original, and now it has a status bar in it.
Any photo resizer or image size reducer can shrink a file. What you want is a 20KB image that still looks like you, and cropping is what makes that possible.
What works better
Start from the original file. Crop it so that only the head and shoulders remain, because the form does not care about the wall or the sofa behind you. Now drop it into the tool above, keep the target at 20 KB, and press Compress.
Here is what happens behind the scenes. The tool saves your picture as a JPG at a range of quality levels and finds the best one that fits under 20 KB. If the picture is still too large at the lowest sensible quality, it reduces the pixel dimensions by a fifth and searches again. It repeats until the file fits or the picture would become too small to be useful.
Most cropped face photos land under 20 KB with clearly recognisable detail. A busy full body photo will not, and no tool can change that. If you see the message that the target could not be reached, crop tighter or pick a plainer photo.
Two mistakes worth avoiding
Chasing exactly 20.0 KB. Aim a little under. Some websites measure a kilobyte as 1000 bytes, and a file that is 20.3 KB in one system can be rejected in another. Setting 19 gives you a safety margin and costs almost nothing in quality.
Ignoring the pixel size. Many forms also state a width and height, such as a fixed rectangle. Compression here targets file size. If your form specifies pixels, set the dimensions in your phone editor first, then compress.
Where to go from here
If the form has a different limit, jump to 15 KB, 25 KB or 30 KB. For scanned signatures, there is a dedicated page on the signature size reducer with a checklist. If you plan to reduce photo size to 20KB often, from a phone, the Android app keeps everything on the device too.
Everything on this page runs in your browser. Your picture is not stored, sent or looked at by anyone else.