Compress an image to 20 KB on your own device
Portals that accept photos almost always cap the file size: exam and job applications, government forms, visa and ID uploads, school portals, ticketing systems. When the limit is 20 KB and your phone produced a 4 MB picture, you need the file smaller — not a different picture. PIXLFLW does that entirely inside your browser: the image is never sent to a server, so nothing is queued, stored or seen by anyone.
How the 20 KB target is reached
Drop the photo here and the download dialog opens with a budget of 20 KB already set. The encoder then searches for the highest JPEG quality that still fits under the limit, rather than picking a fixed quality and hoping. If the photo is so large that even the lowest quality overshoots 20 KB, the pixel dimensions are reduced too — and the result is reported back with its real byte count and its new width and height, so you always know exactly what you are downloading.
Getting a better-looking file at 20 KB
The smaller the budget, the more the pixel count matters. A tightly cropped head-and-shoulders photo at 20 KB looks far better than a full landscape squeezed into the same bytes, because the encoder has less detail to preserve. Crop first, then compress. Photos with large flat areas — a plain background behind a document photo — compress much further than busy textures such as foliage or fabric.
JPG in, JPG out
JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF and HEIC files can all be opened here. The size-targeted export writes JPG, which is what document and exam portals normally require; WEBP is available when you want the same target at higher visual quality for the web. PNG is deliberately not offered for a byte budget: it has no quality setting to trade against.
Free, unlimited, no account
No sign-up, no watermark, no daily cap and no queue. Compress one photo or a hundred, one after another. Everything — decoding, the quality search and the final encode — runs on your own device, which is also why it is instant: there is no upload to wait for.
A form might list the photo size limit as 20kb, 20 KB, or 20 kilobytes. All three mean the same limit.
What 20 KB looks like in pixels
How many pixels fit into depends on how much detail the photo holds. These figures come from 11 real photographs compressed at normal JPEG quality, so treat them as the range to expect, not an exact rule.
| Photo | Pixels (square frame) | Printed at 300 dpi |
|---|---|---|
| Lots of detail: foliage, crowds, fabric | 230 × 230 | 1.9 cm (0.8 in) |
| A typical photo | 350 × 350 | 3 cm (1.2 in) |
| Plain and flat: a face on a blank wall, a scanned document | 630 × 630 | 5.3 cm (2.1 in) |
In a 4:3 frame, a typical photo at 20 KB is about 410 × 310 pixels.
This budget also works as a passport photo: get one under 20 KB with the frame locked.