About PhotoZip
PhotoZip resizes a photograph to an exact file size — 20KB, 50KB, 100KB or whatever number an application form demands — without uploading it anywhere.
Who runs this
PhotoZip is built and maintained by Chen Lei, an independent developer. You can reach me directly at support@pipiboy.com — there is no support ticket system and no chatbot, just that address.
I build small, single-purpose web tools. PhotoZip exists because the photograph-upload step of an application form is a genuinely bad piece of user experience — a portal states a limit in kilobytes, most photo editors think in quality percentages, and the gap between those two ideas costs people an evening and sometimes an application. Closing that gap is a well-defined problem with a checkable answer, which is the kind of thing worth building properly.
What that means in practice: the size limits this site quotes are collected from published notifications, and the size guide explains how to verify them against your own rather than asking you to trust a table. Where a figure is uncertain, the guide says so.
Why it exists
Most photo editors ask you to choose a JPEG quality percentage and hope. That is the wrong control. A modern phone camera produces 3–8MB per photo, and an application portal will accept it only between, say, 20KB and 50KB — so the file has to shrink by more than 99%, and no quality slider tells you whether you are about to land at 40KB or 400KB.
So PhotoZip inverts the control. You state the limit, and it searches for the highest quality and the largest dimensions that fit inside it. It never goes over, because portals reject anything over, and it lands as close to the limit as it can from below.
Your photos are not uploaded
This is the part worth being precise about, because "we care about privacy" is cheap to write.
- The compression runs entirely in your browser, using JavaScript and the HTML canvas API. There is no upload step in the code, not a disabled one — none exists.
- You can verify this the direct way: load the page, then turn off your internet connection (or switch the device to aeroplane mode) and compress a photo. It still works. Something that uploaded your file could not.
- The batch download is assembled in your browser too. The ZIP file is built locally, byte by byte, by code that ships with the page.
The one thing that does involve third parties is advertising, described next. It reads pages and sets cookies; it never receives your photographs.
How this is paid for
PhotoZip is free, with no account and no usage limit. It is paid for by advertising served through Ezoic, an ad management platform that brokers inventory across Google's ad exchange and other demand partners. Advertising partners may set cookies or read device identifiers in order to select and measure ads.
Two consequences of that are worth stating plainly rather than burying:
- The privacy policy describes what those partners collect and how to opt out. It is shorter and more concrete than most.
- Advertising does not influence what the tool does. It does not add a watermark, throttle a free tier, or push you toward a paid version, because there is no paid version to push you toward.
What this site is not
PhotoZip is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any government body, exam board, university or recruitment portal. The size figures in the size guide are the limits applicants encounter most often, collected from published notifications, and they change without notice and vary by post. Always confirm against the official notification for the exam you are applying to — that document, not this site, is what the portal will enforce.
Corrections
If a figure in the size guide is wrong for an exam you are applying to, or a format does not work in your browser, please tell me. Corrections from people who have actually submitted the form are the most useful feedback this site gets.