Where the 2MB limit shows up
Not every upload box is strict — plenty of them simply ask you not to be ridiculous. Email is the classic case: a 6MB photo attached to a message can stall on slow connections, eat the recipient’s mobile data, and push a long thread toward the mailbox cap. Blog and CMS media libraries often cap uploads around 2MB per file, and portfolio sites, marketplaces, and community forums use similar ceilings to keep pages fast. 2MB is the comfortable middle ground: generous enough that a modern phone photo usually keeps 85–95% JPEG quality — effectively indistinguishable from the original — while staying light enough to send, upload, and load anywhere.
How the compressor hits 2MB without hurting quality
The engine works quality-first. It binary-searches JPEG or WebP quality from 90% down to 10% to find the highest quality that lands under 2MB, and only if even the lowest quality cannot fit does it gently shrink the dimensions — never below 320 pixels on the short side. In practice, a 2MB target is so generous that most phone photos settle at high quality with their full dimensions untouched. The exact output size is shown before you download, so you can confirm the file is under the limit yourself. And because everything runs in your browser, there is no queue, no upload, and no waiting on a server.
When 2MB is the wrong target
A target is only right if it matches the job. Sending an avatar, favicon, or forum thumbnail? Our 20KB compressor is the right tool — 2MB would be a hundred times too big. Facing a strict portal cap? Use the 100KB compressor instead. Archiving precious originals? Don’t compress at all — keep the masters untouched. And if you have dozens of photos to slim down, the bulk compressor processes them all with the same settings in one pass. Pick the number the destination actually asks for, and let the engine do the rest.