Compress Image to 100 KB
Enough room for a scanned document that stays readable
KB
Enough room for a scanned document that stays readable
A hundred kilobytes is the limit you meet when a form wants a document rather than a portrait - a marksheet, a certificate, an ID card, a proof of address. It is roughly double the usual photo allowance, and that extra room is there for a reason: text needs it. Upload your scan and it comes back under the limit, measured in real bytes rather than estimated.
JPEG was designed in 1992 for photographs, and it makes an assumption that holds beautifully for a portrait and badly for a page of print: that images are mostly smooth gradients with occasional edges. It saves space by discarding fine, high-contrast detail, on the reasonable grounds that your eye will not miss a little texture in a shirt or a lawn.
Text is nothing but fine, high-contrast detail. Every letter is a hard black edge against white - precisely the information JPEG throws away first. That is why a compressed photograph looks slightly soft while a compressed document looks smudged, and why small print becomes unreadable long before anything else in the image does.
You cannot argue the format out of this. What you can do is stop feeding it detail that does not matter, so the budget goes to the letters.
A flat scan wins almost every time. A phone photo of a document brings uneven lighting, a shadow from your own hand, perspective skew from holding the camera at an angle, and whatever is on the table around the page - all of it detail the compressor has to pay for, none of it anything the reader needs.
If a phone is what you have, shoot straight down over the page in even light, preferably near a window rather than under one overhead bulb, and crop to the page edges before uploading. Most phone camera apps now have a document scanning mode that does the flattening and cropping for you - it is worth finding.
If your form is asking for a photograph rather than a document, 100 KB is a comfortable allowance. A portrait passes with quality to spare, and even a full-frame photo holds up reasonably at moderate dimensions. Crop before uploading and you will barely see the difference.
This tool compresses images, not PDF files. If your form specifically requires a PDF, compress the page images to size first and assemble them into a PDF afterwards with whatever tool you normally use. Be aware that wrapping images in a PDF adds a little overhead, so aim slightly under your target when compressing the pages.
Because JPEG discards hard high-contrast edges first, and text is made entirely of them. Cropping the margins, scanning straight and using greyscale all help by removing detail the compressor would otherwise have to spend bytes on.
Greyscale, unless the form asks for colour or the document carries a coloured stamp or signature that must be visible.
No - images only. Compress the page images first, then assemble the PDF.
JPG. It is the only common format with a quality dial fine enough to hit an exact byte target. If you need another format afterwards, use the Image Converter.
No. It is held in memory only for as long as the compression takes, then discarded. The EXIF metadata your camera wrote - including GPS coordinates - is not carried into the file you download. That matters when the document is an ID card. To see exactly what your original contains, run it through the Photo Privacy Cleaner.
Use the full Compress to Exact Size tool and type any target from 5 KB to 5000 KB, or jump straight to 20 KB or 50 KB.