Compress an image to under 1MB
Bring a photo under 1MB without uploading it. Generous enough that quality is never the constraint, which makes it the safe default.
KB here means 1,000 bytes, so a file under the number you set is under it whichever convention the form on the other end uses.
Drop JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, BMP files here or paste from the clipboard.
Your files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
Where this limit comes from
One megabyte is the figure people land on when there is no stated requirement and something needs to be smaller: an email attachment, a document upload, a file being sent to someone on a slow connection. It is also the per-file ceiling on a number of insurance, banking and claims portals, where photographs of documents and damage have to be uploaded through a form that was specified years ago.
What fits in 1 MB
Any normal photograph at full resolution and high quality. A megabyte is roughly three times what a 12-megapixel phone photo needs at quality 85, so the search usually settles near the top of the quality range and the dimensions are untouched. Only large scans, panoramas and images above about 30 megapixels need reducing.
The default when nobody specified
Most of the time “under 1MB” isn’t a rule, it is a guess at what will work. That makes it a good default, because it is small enough to send anywhere and large enough that nothing visible is lost. If you don’t know the real limit, this is the target to pick.
Where it is actually enforced
Claims portals, insurance uploads and banking document forms are where a hard 1MB cap turns up most often and those are exactly the cases where the photo is of a document or a damaged object and legibility matters more than aesthetics. For those, cap the width rather than leaning on quality: a document photo at 2,000 pixels wide and quality 80 is far more readable than the same photo at 4,000 pixels and quality 45.
What is left to gain
Below a megabyte, the next meaningful saving is dimensional. Quality has a floor below which images degrade visibly, but nobody has ever complained that a photo was only 2,000 pixels wide when it was displayed at 800.
Common questions
Will anyone see the difference at 1MB?
For a normal photograph, no. The search picks the highest quality that fits and at this target that is usually in the nineties, which is visually lossless for practical purposes. The one exception is an image with large smooth gradients, where banding can appear slightly earlier than elsewhere.
How many 1MB photos can I attach to an email?
Around fifteen to eighteen on a typical 25MB limit, because attachment encoding inflates files by roughly a third. If you’re sending more than that, a link to a shared folder is the more reliable route and most mail clients offer it automatically once you go over.
My file is a HEIC. What comes out?
A JPG, because HEIC can’t be written from a browser and because most systems asking for a file under a megabyte won’t open a HEIC anyway. Expect the JPG to be larger than the HEIC was: you’re moving from an efficient codec to an old one and a megabyte is plenty of room for it.
Is 1MB 1,000,000 bytes or 1,048,576?
This tool uses 1,000,000, the decimal figure, which is the safer choice because a file under it is under the binary figure too. Windows displays the binary figure, so a file the tool reports at 1MB may show as 0.95MB in Explorer.
Guides
Compress to a specific size
Each of these opens the tool with the target already set.