Compress JPG to 200KB

Two hundred kilobytes is the most common upload ceiling on public-sector and recruitment portals, and it is considerably more forgiving than the 100 KB tier. At 200 KB a resized photograph can hold genuine detail: a 1200×1600 portrait at quality 70 typically lands in this range and still looks like a photograph rather than a mosaic.

The limit is usually enforced per file rather than per submission, so a form asking for a photograph, a signature and a scanned document applies 200 KB to each independently. Worth checking before compressing everything to a third of the size on the assumption they share a budget.

A file that measures under 200 KB and is still refused almost always failed a different check. Pixel dimensions are the usual culprit — many portals enforce both a size cap and a dimension range, and a 4000px-wide image under 200 KB fails the second test. Some also reject progressive JPEGs, accept only the .jpg extension and not .jpeg, or silently require an sRGB colour profile.

The other frequent cause is the file simply not being a JPEG. Renaming a PNG or a HEIC photo from an iPhone to .jpg changes nothing about its contents, and any server that inspects the actual bytes will reject it. Running the image through this tool re-encodes it as a genuine JPEG, which resolves that case as a side effect.