Runs on your device
Compress an image to 50 KB.
The limit that upload forms hand out most often, and the first one that asks you to choose what the picture is for.
Quality is searched automatically. If quality alone can't get under the limit, dimensions step down too.
1 image · drop more here
or drop them here · JPG, PNG and WebP
- Original
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- Compressed
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- Saved
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Compression settings
What size must it be?
Only for forms that demand a range. Quality is raised first; if that is not enough the image is enlarged to carry more detail.
Limits & output
Leave empty to keep the original dimensions. Aspect ratio is always preserved.
JPEG has no transparency — transparent areas are filled with white.
Choosing a format
- JPEG
- The safest choice for photographs, and the one most forms and older software expect. No transparency — transparent areas become white.
- WebP
- The sensible default for the web. Roughly 25–35% smaller than JPEG at matching perceived quality, and it keeps transparency.
- PNG
- Lossless. Keep it for flat graphics, screenshots with text, and anything that must stay pixel-exact. Avoid it for photographs, where it is often larger than the original camera file.
AVIF is smaller still, but it is slow to encode and not yet universal, so it is not offered here. The guide below goes into more detail.
Results
Compressing to 50 KB
The size where a document outlives a photograph
Every larger ceiling treats a scan and a snapshot roughly alike. This one does not. Run a full-page scan and a holiday picture through at the same 50 KB and the scan comes back the sharper of the two — around 600 pixels wide with its text still readable, while the photograph lands near 550 across and has given up most of what it had to show.
The reason is what each image is made of. A page of type is mostly one flat colour interrupted by hard edges, and an encoder spends very little on that. A photograph is fine, high-contrast texture everywhere — grass, hair, fabric, foliage — which is precisely the detail a lossy encoder has to discard first. At generous ceilings the difference is academic. At 50 KB it decides which of the two is still worth looking at.
So the practical question at this size is what the file is for. If somebody has to read it, 50 KB is comfortable. If somebody has to recognise a face, it is workable. If somebody has to judge a product, a room or a landscape, the number is too small and no setting on this page will change that.
When 50 KB arrives with a floor as well
Forms that cap you at 50 KB frequently name the other end too: between 20 and 50 KB for a photo, above 10 KB for a signature. They will reject a file for being too small just as readily, and that is the one demand ordinary compression cannot meet — every tool on the internet makes files smaller, and yours is already under.
Fill in Minimum size next to the limit and both ends are handled in the same run. Encoder quality goes up first, which costs nothing; only if that is not enough does the image get enlarged so there is genuinely more picture to store. Nothing is padded with dead bytes — that trick satisfies a size check and fails every human and every validator after it.
Two things worth knowing before you rely on it. A very small or very flat original may not reach a high floor at all, and the result will say so rather than pretend. And an enlarged image is softer than the one you started with, so if the form accepts a bigger original, send that instead of asking for one to be manufactured.
Other limits, same tool: 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB. Or read the full guide to formats, quality and file size.
Frequently asked questions
The form wants between 20 KB and 50 KB. Can this do both ends?
Yes, in one pass. Put 50 in the limit and 20 in Minimum size. The search finds the best quality under the ceiling, then checks the floor and lifts the file if it fell short — quality first, dimensions only if quality ran out. Ranges like this are the usual shape on identity and application portals, and they are the reason the field exists.
Is a photograph still usable at 50 KB?
It survives as an identifier, not as an image. Reckon on 550 to 700 pixels across the longest side — enough that a face is recognisable and a phone screen looks filled, and not enough for anything you would enlarge, reframe or inspect afterwards. Treat the output as a copy made for one destination and keep whatever you started from.
Why does my PNG come back only a couple of hundred pixels across?
Because PNG cannot trade quality for bytes — it is lossless, so the only lever left is pixels, and at 50 KB there are very few to spend. A photograph forced through PNG at this ceiling shrinks to a thumbnail. Choose JPEG for anything photographic here. PNG only earns its place at 50 KB for a small flat graphic that must stay pixel-exact.
The form also demands exact pixel dimensions. Do they fight each other?
At this ceiling, sometimes yes — and that is worth knowing before you blame the tool. Type the numbers into Max width and Max height and they are honoured in the same run, but pinning the pixels removes the lever this page normally leans on: with the frame fixed, 50 KB has to come out of encoder quality alone. A 600×800 portrait held to 50 KB will therefore look softer than a free-floating one. Nothing has gone wrong; you have simply spent the budget on geometry instead.
It fits 50 KB but the upload still refuses it. What now?
Look past the weight. Portals turn files away for pixel dimensions, aspect ratio, colour profile and extension far more often than for bytes, and most of them report every one of those as the same unhelpful error. Only if the message is unmistakably about size is it worth aiming lower — a few systems reckon a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes rather than 1,024, and 45 covers that gap invisibly.