Compress an image to 200 KB
The 200 KB target is already set. At this size the format you choose matters as much as the compression.
JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC. Your file is processed on your device.
Aiming for 200 KB or less.
How do I compress an image to 200 KB?
Where the 200 KB limit comes from
Two hundred kilobytes is a limit set by people who are thinking about bandwidth, not about photographs. It shows up on older content management systems, on application forms run by public bodies, on some job boards, and on any system where an administrator once decided that images should not slow the site down and picked a round number.
It is a genuinely tight limit for a photograph. A modern phone picture is thirty to sixty times this size, so roughly 97 per cent of the file has to go. That is achievable and can still look good, but only if the right things are given up.
Format is doing most of the work now
At 500 KB, choosing WebP over JPEG is a nice improvement. At 200 KB it is often the difference between an image that looks fine and one that visibly falls apart. WebP encodes the same visual information in meaningfully fewer bytes, and the tighter the budget the more that gap shows.
The catch is that not everything accepts WebP. Some older upload forms will reject the file outright, and a few will accept it and then fail to display it. If the form you are filling in says JPEG, use JPEG. FileBelow never changes your format behind your back — after a JPEG result it measures whether WebP would genuinely be better for your image and, if so, offers a switch you can decline.
If the image is a logo, a diagram, a screenshot or anything with flat colour and hard edges, the advice inverts: PNG can be dramatically smaller than JPEG for that kind of content, and it keeps text sharp. JPEG’s compression is built for photographs and makes a mess of crisp lines.
What usually goes wrong
People aim at the wrong thing. Told to get under 200 KB, they hold the image at its original dimensions because it feels like the important property to protect, and push quality down until the number is right. What comes back has the resolution they wanted and a texture like wet paper.
Resolution is worth protecting when the image contains text that must stay readable, or when the destination will display it large. For an avatar, a thumbnail, a form photo or anything shown small, resolution is the cheapest thing to spend — and spending it buys back real quality everywhere else.
If it still will not fit
At 200 KB, a PNG photograph will not get there at any sensible size; convert it. Beyond that, the usual obstacle is a minimum-dimension rule. If the form demands both a large image and a small file, FileBelow works out the dimensions that satisfy the byte limit, tells you what they are, and offers them as a button rather than leaving you to guess.