Compress Image to 150 KB

A 150 KB cap turns up in two kinds of places. On application forms it is usually the photo limit of a university, scholarship or job portal that wanted more than a 50 KB exam photo but still something small enough to store for every applicant; the notice tends to say “max 150 KB” or give a band such as 50–150 KB. On websites it is a self-imposed budget that content teams set per image so pages stay quick on mobile data.

WordPress shows why that budget works. From every upload it generates a thumbnail at 150 × 150 px, a medium size at 300 × 300 px and a large size at 1024 × 1024 px, and since version 4.5 it saves those copies at JPEG quality 82. A photo compressed to 150 KB at 1200–1600 px gives it a clean source with little left to lose. Forms that are stricter than this are covered by compress image to 100 KB.

At 150 KB the tool rarely needs to touch the dimensions of an image up to about 1600 px wide. A full phone photo is another matter, so set Resize first to the width your page or form actually shows: spending 150 KB on 1200 px instead of 4032 px means a higher quality for every pixel and a sharper result. If the subject is small in the frame, crop the image first and the same budget goes to the part that matters.