Fit my photo under a size limit

When you need this

"Photograph must not exceed 200KB." Your phone takes 4MB photographs. This one line stops more Ghanaian applications than anything else on a form — scholarship portals, passport applications, job sites, school admissions and bank account openings all set a limit, and none of them tell you how to meet it.

How to use it

1. Type in the limit the form gave you. If it said 200KB, put 200KB, not "small".
2. Drop the photograph in.
3. Save the result. It will land just under the limit rather than far below it, so you keep as much quality as the rule allows.

What it does and does not do

• It aims just under your number. Making a 200KB limit into a 40KB file is not being careful, it is throwing away quality you were allowed to keep.
• It reduces the file, not the subject. Nothing is cropped and nothing is cut off. If the form also sets pixel dimensions, read on.
• Both size and dimensions matter. Some forms say "200KB" and some say "413 by 531 pixels". They are different rules and a photo can fail one while passing the other.
• It works on HEIC from iPhones as well as JPG and PNG.

Getting under a hard limit without ruining the photo

• Photograph in daylight. A grainy photo taken in a dim room compresses badly and looks far worse at 200KB than a clean one does.
• Crop out what is not needed first, with crop, watermark or blur part of a photo. Less picture means more quality for each part that remains.
• A plain background compresses much better than a busy one.
• If it is a passport photograph specifically, use passport photo, Ghana size, which handles both the dimensions and the size.

If something goes wrong

• It still will not upload. Check the file type as well. Many portals take only JPG. Change my photo to JPG or PNG fixes that.
• The result looks soft. The limit is very tight for that photograph. Crop tighter, or retake it with more light.
• The form wants a PDF, not an image. Use turn my photos into one PDF.