How do I make an image file smaller without making it look like potato soup?
Government portals and job applications love demanding photos under 200 KB while modern phones take 12 MB raw photos of your cat.
The short answer
Convert heavy PNGs to modern WebP or optimized JPG, scale dimensions down to standard web widths (1200 to 1920 px), and set quality to 80%.
Step 1: Check the file format
PNG is lossless and great for diagrams or text screenshots, but enormous for photos. Photos should always be JPG or WebP.
Step 2: Reduce pixel dimensions
A 4000 × 3000 photo from your phone holds 12 million pixels. Resizing it to 1600 × 1200 keeps about a sixth of them, which is still more than most screens display, and the file shrinks accordingly.
Step 3: Adjust compression quality to 80% to 85%
Between quality 95 and quality 82 the file often halves, and the difference is hard to spot at normal viewing size. Drop below about 70 and the blocky edges start showing.
Common mistakes
- Saving photographs as PNG and wondering why the file is 8 megabytes.
- Recompressing an already degraded JPG over and over, creating digital artifacts.
- Uploading a private document to an unknown server when a browser can do the same compression without the file ever leaving the device.