What a megabyte holds
A megabyte is about 1,000 kilobytes, or roughly one million bytes by the decimal convention. It is large enough for a full-resolution phone photo and small enough to attach to an ordinary email.
Scale matters when choosing a limit. A page of text is a fraction of a megabyte, a photograph is often one or two, and a minute of video can run well past that.
MB limits you will meet
Web forms, email systems, and messaging apps each publish a ceiling in MB or KB. Photographs straight from a camera can exceed those ceilings comfortably, which is where compression comes in.
Filekind sets its own limits for good reasons: images are accepted up to 25 MB, and PDFs up to 50 MB, so browser processing stays responsive while ordinary files pass through easily.
- Images: up to 25 MB each
- PDFs: up to 50 MB each
- Rendered PDF output: up to 150 MB total
- Most email attachments: far smaller ceilings
Bringing a file under an MB limit
Start with dimensions if the image is displayed small, then adjust compression until the result clears the ceiling with a little room to spare.
The Filekind compressor takes a limit in MB or KB and searches for a JPEG at or below it, reporting the final size and dimensions in the browser before anything is downloaded.