Every few weeks someone on a team hits the same wall: a portal, job application or government form says "JPG only, max 200 KB", and the file you have is a 2.4 MB PNG screenshot or a WebP you saved from a browser.
A few things worth knowing before you start fiddling:
1. Format first, then size. PNG is lossless, so screenshots with lots of text stay big. Converting to JPG alone often cuts the file by 70–90%. WebP is even smaller, but many older upload forms still reject it, which is why "JPG only" keeps showing up.
2. Resize before you crank down quality. A 3000 px wide screenshot shown in a 600 px box wastes most of its bytes. Dropping the width to around 1200–1600 px usually gets you under the limit while text stays readable. Lowering JPG quality below ~60 is where blurry, blocky text starts.
3. Crop the noise. Browser tabs, taskbars and empty margins add pixels nobody needs. A quick crop is often the difference between 260 KB and 180 KB.
4. Keep the original. Save the converted copy with a new name so you can redo it if the form also wants a different size later.
5. ICO and favicons are their own thing. If what you actually need is a site icon, export a small square PNG and convert it to ICO instead of shrinking a big logo.
If you want to do all of this in one place without installing anything, we built the Convertola image converter for exactly this: it converts between JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, BMP and ICO, and lets you resize, crop and shrink to a target KB size in the browser, no sign-up. (Disclosure: it's our project.)
What's the strangest upload limit you've had to work around?
