Compress a Passport Photo to 240 KB for a Visa Application

The US DS-160 online visa application is the best-known case: it asks for a square JPEG between 600×600 and 1200×1200 pixels, no larger than 240 KB. Other countries' e-visa portals work the same way with different numbers — some cap uploads at 100 KB, others at 1 MB — so always confirm the current rules in the official instructions for your application before you start.

Two things get photo uploads rejected: files that are too big, and photos that are too poor — over-compressed, blurry or too small. The goal is not the smallest possible file; it is a sharp, correctly framed photo that lands comfortably under the cap.

Start with the crop, not the compressor. Visa photos are square, and cropping away background usually removes more kilobytes than any quality slider. Open your photo in the browser photo editor and crop to a square centred on your head and shoulders, following the framing rules in your application's instructions — our short guide to cropping and resizing a photo online walks through it.

Mind the floor as well as the cap: do not go below the 600×600 pixel minimum, and do not upscale a tiny photo to reach it. A crop in the 600–800 pixel range is the sweet spot — big enough to pass quality checks, small enough that 240 KB is easy.

One more pre-step for iPhone photos: portals want JPEG, not HEIC. Convert HEIC to JPG in your browser first, then crop.

Now drop the cropped photo into the free JPG compressor. One honest note: there is no "compress to 240 KB" box — the controls are a quality slider and an optional maximum-dimension cap, and the file size is the result. The loop is quick:

1. Set the quality slider — around 80 is a good first try.
2. Read the per-file "in → out" size shown in the results list.
3. Still over? Lower the quality a notch (or cap the dimensions) and run it again.

Aim for roughly 230 KB, not 240 KB: the size readout rounds to whole kilobytes, so a file displayed as "240 KB" can be a few hundred bytes over the strict limit the portal actually checks. And because everything runs on your device, your passport photo is never uploaded to anyone's server while you iterate.

If the file will not go under the cap, one of these is almost always why:

• The crop is huge. A 3000×3000 square from a modern phone wastes the whole budget. Cap the output at 900–1200 pixels — still well above the minimum.
• It is a PNG. Photos compress far better as JPEG; export the crop as JPG before compressing.
• Heavy noise. Low-light shots compress poorly; a slightly smaller resize smooths the noise and shrinks the file.

The same loop works for any upload limit, not just this one — see the general guide to compressing an image to an exact size in KB, or the tighter 100 KB walkthrough if your portal's cap is smaller.