Who asks for 2 MB
WordPress and many other content systems ship with a 2 MB default upload limit that site owners never change. Contact forms, support ticket attachments and document portals commonly use the same figure. If an upload failed with no explanation on a WordPress site, 2 MB is the most likely reason.
What fits in 2 MB
A full-resolution photograph from almost any phone or camera, at quality indistinguishable from the original in normal use.
What it costs you
Essentially nothing you can see. At 2 MB the constraint is rarely the image — it is the server refusing anything larger. Most photographs pass this limit already; the ones that do not are usually high-resolution camera files or screenshots saved as PNG, and converting a PNG screenshot to JPEG will often solve it on its own.
How this hits the number
Compression quality and file size do not move together in a straight line, so there is no setting that reliably produces 2 MB. This encodes your image repeatedly at different quality levels, narrowing in on the highest one whose output still fits, and returns that file. It never hands back something over the limit, because a file over the limit is the one thing you cannot use.
All of it runs in this browser tab using the canvas API. Your image is read from disk into the page, worked on, and written back out. Nothing is uploaded, which you can confirm yourself — open your browser's network tab and watch it stay empty while the tool runs.
Common questions
Why does WordPress say my file is too large?
Because PHP ships with an upload limit — commonly 2 MB — and most sites never raise it. The message names the limit but not the fix. Bringing the image under the figure it quotes is the fastest route; changing the server setting requires access you may not have.
My PNG is 8 MB — how do I get it under 2 MB?
Save it as JPEG instead. PNG is lossless, so a photograph or screenshot stored that way is enormous compared to the same image as JPEG. Set the format to JPEG here and the same picture will usually land far under 2 MB. Keep PNG only if the image has transparency or is mostly flat colour and text.
Will compressing to 2 MB affect print quality?
For most purposes, no. Print quality depends far more on pixel dimensions than on file size, and this changes only the encoding, never the dimensions. For a professional print job, work from the original file — but for anything a normal printer produces, a 2 MB JPEG is more than sufficient.