Drop an image and get it back under 10KB, automatically. Free and private.
10KB is about a hundredth of what a modern phone camera produces. Getting there is not a matter of nudging a quality slider — the image has to give up most of its pixels as well as most of its detail.
The good news is that the things people are usually asked to squeeze into 10KB are signatures and thumb impressions, and those are mostly white paper. Large areas of a single flat colour compress to almost nothing, which is why a signature at 10KB can still look sharp while a photograph at the same size looks like a bad fax.
10KB is about the size of a short text file, so there is very little room for detail. A plain signature, a thumb impression or a small passport-style photo is about what fits. In most cases that means an image only a couple of hundred pixels wide.
Black ink on a white background is by far the easiest content to shrink, because large flat areas cost almost nothing to store. A busy photo with a patterned background will lose visible detail well before it gets down to 10KB.
Crop tight before you upload, so every kilobyte is spent on the subject. For a signature, sign with a dark pen on plain white paper and photograph it flat in even light; shadows and paper texture add noise that eats into the budget.
If a photo comes out too soft, the page will have reduced its dimensions to reach the limit. Starting from a close-up face or signature, instead of a wide shot, gives a sharper 10KB result.
Crop first, and crop hard. If a third of your image is desk, notebook margin or shadow, you are spending your entire 10KB budget storing things nobody needs to see.
Then fix the contrast. A signature photographed under a ceiling light picks up a grey cast across the paper, and grey gradients are expensive to store — far more expensive than pure white. Brightening the page until it is genuinely white can halve the file size on its own.
Only after that does compression matter. This page handles that last part for you: it steps the JPEG quality down, and the dimensions with it if necessary, until the result is under 10KB, and stops at the first setting that fits rather than crushing the image further than it needs to.
Your browser searches for the highest JPG quality that fits under 10 KB, then reduces the picture's dimensions in stages if quality alone cannot get there. Everything runs on your own device. To use it, add your photo or signature, keep the 10 KB target, press Compress, and check that the result is still clear before downloading. At a limit this small, simple images such as signatures compress far better than detailed photos.
A signature, a stamp or a simple line image fits comfortably. A detailed colour photograph will fit, but it has to become small in pixel terms too — expect something around 200 pixels wide.
Signature and thumb impression uploads on older government and banking portals. Photographs are rarely capped this low; if a form asks for 10KB it is almost always asking for a signature.
Crop away everything except the signature itself, and make sure the paper is properly white rather than grey. White areas cost almost nothing to store, so a clean crop buys you all the quality.
No. The compression runs inside your browser using your own device, so the image never leaves your computer or phone.
Yes, but it will be small, around the size of a thumbnail. A close-cropped face on a plain background holds up best. If a form allows 20KB or 50KB, use that for a clearer picture.