Compress a JPG to 20 KB

What 20 KB buys you in JPG

20 KB is a small but honest thumbnail, roughly 200x200 to 280x280 pixels for a clean subject. A face stays recognizable and a flat logo looks sharp. Busy textures like grass or hair will soften, since JPG drops the fine detail to make room.

The reason JPG lands on 20 KB so well is that it is lossy by design. The encoder can trade visible quality for bytes in small steps until it matches the target. JPG and JPEG mean the same thing, so a .jpeg file works exactly the same.

Hitting the target without mush

Start from a modest source rather than a 12-megapixel original. The fewer pixels the encoder has to cover, the more quality it keeps per pixel at 20 KB. A tight crop helps for the same reason.

Need a gentler limit or a different input format? Compress to any size lets you raise the target. For hands-on control of the quality setting on a plain photo, quality-based JPEG compression is the tool to reach for.

Grayscale is the cheapest win at this size

20 KB leaves almost nothing for colour. If the image is a signature, a scanned stamp, or line art, the colour channels are storing paper tint rather than anything you need.

Dropping to grayscale before compressing hands that budget back to the detail that matters. For a photograph, keep the colour and buy your headroom by cropping tighter instead, since a smaller frame at 20 KB looks far better than a wide one.