A 20 KB cap is the signature of government portals, exam registrations, and visa systems — usually for a passport-style photo or signature scan. It's an aggressive target that most tools miss or hit by silently wrecking the image.
This page opens the compressor in target-size mode set to 20 KB. It searches for the highest quality that fits, and — crucial for this size — tells you plainly when the target is unreachable at your image's dimensions instead of pretending.
Loading tool…
This is Compress Image preconfigured for this task — open the full tool for every option.
Select an image; it decodes locally.
Choose an output format and quality, or set a target file size.
Compare original and compressed versions with the wipe slider.
Download — the size you saw is exactly the size you get.
The compressed bytes are re-decoded to confirm the image parses and dimensions match, and the displayed byte size is measured from the actual output blob.
Reduce the pixel dimensions first; file size scales with area. A 1000px photo can't hit 20 KB gracefully, but the same photo at 400px usually can. Resize, then compress.
Legacy infrastructure and cautious storage budgets. The cap is rarely negotiable, so the practical path is small dimensions plus target-size compression — both doable locally here.
No — which matters for exactly this kind of document. Encoding runs in your browser; the photo never leaves your device.
Technical guidance for choosing settings and reviewing the result.
There is no quality percentage that makes every image exactly 1 MB or 100 KB. A reliable target-size workflow measures real encodes, preserves the best result under the limit, and tells you when resizing is necessary.
8 min read · Reviewed August 2026