Compress image to 20 KB
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Get a scanned signature or small photo under 20 KB, with the exact byte count shown before you upload.
20 KB is one of the tightest limits you will meet on an online form, small enough that a phone photo has to lose most of its bytes. It is most often asked for scanned signatures. This page takes a JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP or AVIF, searches for the highest JPG quality that fits under 20,000 bytes, and only if that isn’t enough, scales the image down step by step. You see the final quality, pixel size and exact byte count.
How to compress an image to 20 KB
- Crop your signature or photo tightly first (a signature should fill the frame), then drop it here.
- The target is set to 20 KB. Turn off “Keep date taken” to give those few hundred bytes to the image instead.
- Press Compress, check the reported size, and download the JPG.
What happens to quality, size and metadata
We try quality first, because shrinking the pixel size loses more detail than a lower quality setting does. If even quality 30 is too big, the image is scaled down in steps of 15% and searched again. The result is the sharpest JPG we found that still fits.
A target of 20 KB here means 20,000 bytes at most, not 20 × 1024. Being stricter means the file passes either way a form might count. The output is always a JPG; transparent areas become white.
Where 20 KB is asked for
In India, 20 KB is the typical upper limit for the scanned signature on recruitment and exam applications: staff selection exams, bank recruitment, railway recruitment boards and many state public service commissions ask for a signature of roughly 10–20 KB, and some also want the photo at 20–50 KB. A few older portals cap the photo itself at 20 KB. Smaller institutes, scholarship schemes and university forms sometimes copy the same limits. Always read the notification for the exact range, because some portals reject files that are too small as well as too big, and some also fix the pixel dimensions.
Tips for clear photos at small sizes
- Sign with a black or dark-blue pen on plain white paper and photograph it in daylight, without shadows.
- Crop away all empty paper: bytes spent on blank margins are bytes your signature doesn’t get.
- If the portal also asks for dimensions such as 140 × 60 px, resize first, then compress here.
Troubleshooting
- The portal says the file is too small. Some forms need 10–20 KB. Our result aims as close under 20 KB as the quality steps allow; if yours lands under 10 KB, the image was already tiny, so start from a larger scan.
- The signature looks faint. Light pen strokes vanish at small sizes. Re-scan with a darker pen and more contrast.
- A PNG signature with a transparent background. It becomes a JPG on white, which is what forms expect.
- Wrong dimensions. This page controls bytes, not exact pixels. Use the resize tool for pixel sizes.
Questions and answers
How do I reduce a signature to 20 KB?
Photograph or scan the signature on white paper, crop it tightly, then drop the image here with the target at 20 KB. We find the best quality that fits, scale down only if necessary, and show the exact byte count. Download the JPG and upload it to the form.
Is 20 KB the same as 20,000 bytes?
It depends on who is counting: some systems treat 1 KB as 1,000 bytes and others as 1,024, so 20 KB could mean 20,000 or 20,480 bytes. We always aim for 20,000 bytes or less, which passes both interpretations, and we show the exact count so you can compare it with the form’s rule.
Can I make a photo 20 KB without losing quality?
Not without some loss: a phone photo of several megabytes has to give up most of its data. The trick is losing the right data, which is why we lower JPG quality before reducing dimensions. Crop out background and the visible quality at 20 KB improves considerably.