Compress Image to 1 MB
Get a photo under 1 MB while keeping as much detail as fits.
Drop an image here
Or choose a file, or paste a screenshot. It is measured and re-encoded on your device and never uploaded.
Fitting on your device…
That didn't work.
Your image is opened, measured and re-encoded in this browser. It is never uploaded, and nothing about it is stored.
Keyboard shortcuts
- / or ⌘K
- Search every tool
- ⌘↵
- Run this tool, from anywhere on the page
- ⌘S
- Download the result
- ?
- Open and close this list
About the Pathine Compress Image to 1 MB
One megabyte is the most common upload limit on the internet, and a modern phone photograph is comfortably two to five times over it. It is also a generous enough budget that getting under it costs almost nothing you can see.
This encodes at the best quality that lands under 1 MB and reports what it settled on. No slider to guess at, no re-checking the file size in a folder afterwards.
When you'd reach for it
A web form that rejects your photo
One megabyte is the default limit in a great many form builders and application systems, and the error message rarely says how far over you are.
A marketplace listing
Selling platforms cap listing images and will silently re-compress anything larger, usually worse than this does.
A document scan taken with a phone
Photographing a document produces a much larger file than scanning one, and 1 MB is plenty for something that only needs to be legible.
How to use it
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Drop the image in
Drag a file onto the page, choose one, or paste a screenshot. Nothing is uploaded — the work happens on your device.
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Read the report
Every requirement is listed with a tick or a cross against what your file actually is. Anything the rule asks for that software cannot check is listed too, unticked.
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Download it
The file you get is the one that passed. If nothing could pass, you are told the closest achievable size instead of being handed something that will be rejected.
Common questions
Is any quality lost?
Some, but at 1 MB it is very hard to see. The tool starts at a high quality setting and only reduces it as far as it must; for an image that already fits, nothing is changed at all.
What if my image is already under 1 MB?
You get it back essentially untouched. The tool tries the highest quality first, and if that already fits it stops — degrading a file that already met the requirement, just to prove it ran, would be pointless.
Does it strip the location data?
Yes. Re-encoding drops all EXIF metadata, including the GPS coordinates a phone writes into every photo. That is worth knowing before you upload anything taken at home.
Can I get a specific width as well?
Use Make Image Fit, which takes dimensions and a size limit together and reports on both. This page is the size limit on its own.