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Getting a photo under 1 MB
A photo from a recent phone or camera is often 5 to 12 MB. Marketplaces, rental listings, portfolio sites and support forms commonly cap uploads at 1 MB.
At 1 MB most photos keep 3000 pixels or more on the longest side at high JPEG quality, which is sharper than nearly any screen can show. Often the lossless re-encode, which only strips metadata, is enough on its own.
Tips
- Stripping metadata also removes the photo's GPS location, which is worth doing before you post it publicly.
- iPhone photos (HEIC) work too. HEIC photos are saved as JPEG.
- RAW files are not supported. Export a JPEG from your editor, then compress that.
Questions
Will a site that counts 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes accept my JPG?
Sites differ, so we aim under 1,000,000 bytes, the stricter reading, and a site that counts 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes accepts it too. A computer that divides by 1024 may show the result as about 976 KB or 0.95 MB.
When is the lossless re-save enough to get a photo under 1 MB?
We try it only when the photo is under 2 MB, since it saves a few percent at most. A photo only just over 1 MB may get under it this way with every pixel intact. A 5 MB photo skips it and goes straight to the resize steps.
If the lossless re-save is enough for 1 MB, what actually changes in my photo?
For an upright JPEG, nothing you can see: the compressed image data is reused as it is, the colour profile stays, and only the metadata is dropped and the coding tightened. A photo stored sideways with a rotation flag is the exception; it is re-saved at quality 95 with the rotation applied.
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