The comfortable middle ground
At 200 KB you stop making painful trade-offs: a 1600–1920 px JPG at quality ~78 fits, which looks excellent on laptops and phones alike. It is the sensible ceiling for résumé photos, blog images, LinkedIn uploads, listing photos and email attachments that shouldn't bloat anyone's inbox.
It is also a good performance budget for websites: pages whose images each stay under 200 KB rarely have image-driven Core Web Vitals problems. More on that in compressing images for websites.
At 200 KB you can expect
| Source | Outcome under 200 KB |
|---|---|
| 12–48 MP phone/DSLR photo | ~1600–1920 px, quality 75–85 — screen-perfect |
| Scanned document | Fully readable, near-print quality |
| Web/blog hero image | Full 1920 px width at good quality |
| Graphics or screenshots | Crisp — consider WebP output for even smaller results |