Compress an image to 1 MB
A common email and upload limit that keeps photos looking their best.
- Private by defaultDeleted within an hour
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
1 MB is large enough that this tool rarely needs to compromise on quality to reach it; most compressed results come out visually identical to the original. This target is most useful when an email provider, cloud form, or upload system enforces a per-file cap and you just need to get comfortably under it.
If you are sending several 1 MB-class photos somewhere with a combined size limit rather than a per-file one, compressing each one down further, for example to 500 KB, leaves more headroom for the whole batch.
Your photos are processed on our own servers in the EU, never shared with anyone, and the results are deleted automatically within one hour. If several photos all need to land under 1 MB for the same purpose, compressing them together as a batch with the same setting keeps the results consistent across all of them. It's worth remembering that the original file is restored automatically whenever a photo is already small enough, so nothing is ever made larger by mistake.
1 MB against today's cameras
A current phone saves photos of 12 megapixels, often 48 or more in its high-resolution mode, and each file weighs between 2 and 12 MB. A mirrorless camera at 24 megapixels writes JPEGs of 8 to 15 MB. Bringing those under 1 MB is the most common reason people land on this page.
At 12 megapixels a 1 MB JPEG leaves about two thirds of a bit per pixel, which a careful encoder turns into a picture that looks untouched on screen. At 24 megapixels and above the same megabyte is stretched too far to hide. Halve the width and height in Resize and you are back to a quarter of the pixels, at a quality that is hard to tell from the original.
Megabytes and mebibytes
There are two megabytes in use. The decimal one is 1,000,000 bytes. The binary one, properly a mebibyte, is 1,048,576 bytes, and it is what Windows shows in its file properties under the name MB. A limit written as 1 MB could mean either, and you rarely know which. We aim for the decimal megabyte, the smaller of the two, so the file passes both readings. In Windows Explorer it will show as about 977 KB.
Printing a photo that was compressed to 1 MB
File size and print size are only loosely linked. What a printer needs is pixels, around 300 for every inch of paper. A 12-megapixel photo is 4000 by 3000 pixels, enough for a sharp print of 34 by 25 centimetres, and compressing it to 1 MB does not take a single pixel away as long as the tool did not have to resize. At that size the mild loss of fine texture is invisible on paper. For a large canvas or a poster, send the lab the original.
Frequently asked questions
Is 1 MB a safe size for email attachments?
Most providers allow several times that per message, but 1 MB per photo is a comfortable, widely accepted size.
Does compressing to 1 MB change the photo noticeably?
Rarely; most photos reach 1 MB with quality to spare.
Can I compress a whole folder of photos at once?
Select every file you want in one go from the file picker or drag them all in together; the batch limit is 20 on the free plan.
What if my original is already under 1 MB?
The row is marked "Already optimized" and the download gives you the original file unchanged.
Does compressing to 1 MB reduce the resolution?
Only when it has to. Quality is lowered first and the dimensions are kept. The result shows the final width and height, so you can see whether they changed.
My camera files are over 20 MB. Can I still use this?
Files up to 20 MB work without an account. Larger ones, up to 200 MB each, are part of the Pro plan, which also takes 500 files in a batch.