Compress image to 200KB

How this works

With 204,800 bytes to work with, the very first encoding attempt at quality 0.95 succeeds for a lot of images, and the search stops after a single round. Files that arrive already under 200KB skip the encoder entirely and come back byte for byte identical, so nothing is spent re-compressing something that was fine. Only large, detailed originals push the search far enough down to leave a mark.

What it cannot do

• A high-resolution photograph straight from a phone is often several megabytes and will still need real compression to reach 200KB.
• Metadata is not preserved. Re-encoding through a canvas drops EXIF, so shooting data and orientation tags do not survive.

Questions people actually ask

Will 200KB be enough of a reduction?

For most uses, yes. A phone photograph is commonly 2MB to 5MB, so reaching 200KB is a reduction of ten to twenty five times while quality typically stays above 0.7. Whether that is small enough depends on what you are feeding it to.

What happens to my EXIF data?

It is dropped. Compression runs through a canvas, which produces a fresh image with no metadata attached, so the camera model and the GPS coordinates are both gone, along with the orientation tag. That removes location data from a photo you are about to share, which some people want and others do not.

Why did my file come back exactly the same size?

Because it was already under 200KB. The tool returns those unchanged rather than re-encoding them, since re-encoding an already-small JPEG loses quality without saving anything worth having.

Is the file sent anywhere before the EXIF is stripped?

No. The file is decoded and re-encoded entirely in your browser, and the metadata is dropped as a side effect of that re-encoding rather than by a service inspecting your photo. Nothing about the image leaves the tab.