Skip to content
SellerPhotoKit

Free forever · No account

Compress photos to the size the listing form demands

Give it the limit you have been told about and it works out the quality — as high as will fit. Every photo keeps its full dimensions, anything already small enough is copied across untouched, and nothing leaves this tab.

Your photos are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to a server.

Compress photos to the size the listing form demands

Compress to
Save as

Every photo to under 1 MB · JPEG

Quality is worked out per photo — as high as will fit, never below 40%. Anything already small enough is copied across untouched.

1 MB is Etsy's published limit.

Drop photos that are too big to upload

Pick the size you need to be under. Every photo keeps its full dimensions — only the file size comes down, and only as far as it has to.

iPhone HEIC works
Dropped straight from the camera roll. Converted to JPEG on the way out.
Nothing is uploaded
Every photo is processed inside this browser tab. No server ever sees it.
Drop anywhere
The whole page accepts photos — no need to aim for a small box.

Most of a 5 MB phone photo is detail no buyer will ever see

Your camera is not saving a listing photo. It is saving the best record it can of what the sensor captured, at 12 to 48 megapixels and near-maximum quality, because it has no idea the picture is destined for a 400-pixel-wide thumbnail on someone's phone.

A large part of that file is sensor noise — the fine random speckle in every digital photo, worst in the shadows and worst indoors. Noise is expensive to store for exactly the reason it is worthless to look at: it is random, so nothing about it compresses well. An encoder asked for a smaller file discards it early, which is why the first two-thirds off a phone photo generally costs nothing you can see.

The part that is worth keeping is the texture: the knit of a jumper, the grain of leather, the print on a label. That is what a returns dispute turns on, and it is why this tool spends the highest quality that fits rather than a quality that is merely safe.

Two of the six marketplaces publish a maximum file size

The other 4 document a recommended size and a minimum, but no cap. Where a cap does exist it is worth reading alongside the dimensions the same platform asks for, because those two numbers are what the encoder has to satisfy at once — and they are not equally kind.

Etsy

250 KB per megapixel

Maximum file size
1 MB
Recommended
2000 × 2000 · 4.0 MP

eBay

2.7 MB per megapixel

Maximum file size
7 MB
Recommended
1600 × 1600 · 2.6 MP

That last figure is the whole story: it is the cap divided by the pixels the platform asks for, and it is how many bytes the encoder gets to spend on each megapixel of your photo. Etsy leaves roughly 250 KB per megapixel, which is a real squeeze on a photograph. eBay leaves about 2.7 MB, which is more than a full-quality export normally needs — its cap is a guard against someone uploading a RAW file, not a constraint on ordinary photos.

Both figures are read from the same source data as the size chips above, so a limit re-verified in one place changes in both. Every cap on this site cites the marketplace's own help page and the date it was last checked.

When the answer is the resizer instead

There are two ways to make an image file smaller, and they are not interchangeable. Losing pixels and losing precision look different, fail differently, and the right one depends on something this tool cannot see: how big the photo will actually be displayed.

Compressing

Keeps every pixel and stores each one less precisely. Push it far enough and you get blocking around edges, smearing in fine texture, and haloes on lettering. Nothing is cropped and nothing is scaled.

Right when the dimensions are already what you want.

Resizing

Removes pixels outright. Halving both edges quarters the pixel count, which is a far bigger saving than any quality setting — and completely invisible if those pixels were never going to be displayed anyway.

Right when the photo is bigger than the marketplace shows it.

The order matters, and it is resize first

A 48-megapixel photo squeezed into 1 MB has spent its entire byte budget describing four times more pixels than any listing page will show. The same 1 MB spread across a 2000-pixel square is four times as much information per pixel, and it looks obviously better at the size a buyer actually sees. Compressing a photo that should have been resized is the single most common way people end up with a listing full of mush.

So if your photo is larger than the platform's recommended size, start with theresizer — it takes a target file size as well, which means one pass often does both jobs. Come back here when the dimensions are already right and the file is still too heavy, or when the size you need has nothing to do with a marketplace at all: an email attachment limit, a form that rejects anything over 2 MB, a shared folder that has stopped syncing.

Why there is no quality slider

A slider asks you to guess. Nobody knows what quality 85 means for their particular photo, so the honest workflow it implies is: pick a number, export, check the size, adjust, repeat. That is a search — and a computer runs it in a fraction of a second without getting bored on the fourth attempt.

So the input here is the number you actually have. Each photo is encoded at quality 85, measured, and — if it missed — encoded again at a quality corrected by how far off it was, narrowing the range each time. At most 6 attempts, and the result kept is the highest quality that came in under your target rather than the first one that fit. Each card reports the quality it settled on and how many passes it took.

There is a floor at quality 40. Below that a photograph stops being usable for selling, so instead of returning something worse the tool tells you the target cannot be met at this pixel count and works out roughly what the long edge would have to be. That is a more useful answer than a file that technically fits.

The case for doing nothing

A photo already under your target is copied across byte for byte and the card says so. This sounds obvious and almost no compressor does it: re-encoding unconditionally costs a generation of quality on a file that did not need it, and on an already-optimised JPEG it can hand back something larger than what went in. The only reason to touch a file that already fits is a format conversion you asked for.

What this cannot do

  • Hit any target at any size. Compression trades precision, and there is a point past which a photograph is not worth looking at. Ask a 12-megapixel photo for 100 KB and it will get as close as quality 40 allows, then tell you plainly that it did not make it and what to resize to. A tool that quietly handed back a file over your limit would be worse than one that refused.
  • Undo a previous compression. Detail thrown away by whatever produced the file you dropped in is gone, and re-encoding it here spends a second generation of quality on top. If you still have the original off the camera, compress that instead — one generation from the source always beats two.
  • Show you the damage in a thumbnail. Compression artefacts are close to invisible at 80 pixels wide, which is exactly the size at which every tool shows you its results. Each finished card links the full-size output for that reason — if you are compressing hard, open one and look at a label or a seam before you trust the whole batch.
  • Help a screenshot or a flat graphic. JPEG and WebP are built for photographs. Text, line art, logos and screenshots go blotchy around their edges at any quality worth using, and a PNG of that kind of image is usually already smaller than the JPEG it would become. The tool warns you when it recognises one, but it will still do as it is told.
  • Promise a platform will not re-compress it anyway. Most marketplaces re-encode on upload for their own delivery, and that pass is out of everyone's hands. Meeting the published limit is what stops your upload being rejected or silently dropped; what happens after that is on their terms, and handing them the highest quality that fits is the best available position.

Common questions

How do I compress a photo to a specific size like 200 KB?
Type the number in and press the button. That is the whole difference between this and a quality slider: you already know the limit you have been given, and working out which quality setting lands under it is arithmetic a computer should be doing. Every photo is encoded, measured, and encoded again at a corrected quality until it fits — so the file you get back is genuinely under the size you asked for rather than approximately near it.
Will compressing make my listing photos look worse?
A little, and the amount depends entirely on how far you are asking it to go. Coming down from 4 MB to 1 MB on a phone photo is usually invisible at listing size, because most of those 4 MB are camera noise that the encoder discards first. Asking a 12-megapixel photo to fit in 100 KB is not invisible and never will be. The tool will not go below quality 40 — past that point it tells you the photo needs fewer pixels instead of fewer bytes, and gives you the number.
Does this change my photo's dimensions?
No. Every photo comes back at exactly the pixel width and height it went in at; only the file size changes. That is a deliberate split — if a 1 MB limit cannot be met at your photo's full size, the tool says so and tells you what to resize to, rather than silently shrinking a photo you asked it to compress. Resizing is the other tool.
Why is my phone photo 5 MB when the listing form wants 1 MB?
Because your camera is not optimising for a listing form. A modern phone shoots 12 to 48 megapixels and saves at near-maximum quality, so almost all of that file is detail no buyer will ever see on a 400-pixel-wide thumbnail — including sensor noise, which is expensive to store precisely because it is random. Re-encoding at a quality chosen for the web routinely removes 70 to 80% of the file with no visible change at listing size.
Should I compress, or resize?
Resize if your photo is larger than the marketplace displays it, which for a phone photo it almost always is — that removes bytes by removing pixels nobody was going to see, and it costs less visible quality than squeezing the same pixel count harder. Compress when the dimensions are already what you want and the file is still too big. If you need both, resize first and compress second: the resizer here targets a file size too.
Is a smaller file worse for my listing's search ranking?
Nothing any of these marketplaces publishes suggests file size affects ranking directly. Two indirect effects are real: a photo below a platform's minimum pixel size can be rejected or penalised, and an upload that fails silently on a size limit leaves you with a listing that has fewer photos than you think — which does matter. Meeting the published limits at the recommended dimensions is the whole objective, and it is why this tool never reduces pixels.
Are my photos uploaded to a server?
No. The encoding happens inside this browser tab using the same image machinery the browser already has, and there is no server to send a photo to. You can check rather than trust: open your browser's network inspector, compress a batch, and watch that nothing leaves. It is also why a batch of twenty is fine — nothing is queueing behind anyone else.
What is the difference between JPEG and WebP here?
WebP typically produces a file a fifth to a third smaller than JPEG at the same visible quality, which is real and worth having. It is also the format most of these marketplaces do not list as accepted, and the tool names which ones do before you choose it. JPEG is the answer unless you know the destination takes WebP.

More free photo tools

All of them run on your own device, all of them are free, and none of them ask who you are.