A 1 MB JPG test file

About this file

A 1 MB test file in JPG format, sized to exactly 1,048,576 bytes. Free to download with no signup, for verifying upload limits and file-handling behaviour.

The MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 values listed above are the real digests of this file. Recomputing them after download confirms the transfer was not corrupted, and they double as known-good expected values when testing a hashing library.

What this size means in practice

1 MB is exactly the nginx client_max_body_size default (1m). Behind a reverse proxy where nobody set that directive, anything larger never reaches your application — nginx answers 413 Request Entity Too Large itself.

That makes it the ideal size for reproducing the classic incident where the app limit was raised to 10 MB yet uploads still fail at 1 MB. If the 413 never appears in your application log, the cause is almost always the proxy layer in front of it.

Getting a feel for this size

On a 10 Mbps link the transfer takes roughly 839 ms, and about 84 ms at 100 Mbps. Base64-encoded it grows to roughly 1,365 KB.

Estimating a photographic JPG at roughly 0.2 bytes per pixel, this size works out to around 5,242,880 pixels — about 2,644 × 1,983 px at a 4:3 aspect ratio. Compression varies enormously with image content, so treat this purely as an order-of-magnitude figure.

What to check for this format

JPEG is lossy and has no transparency. Its signature begins with FF D8 FF. The single most common defect in real implementations is ignoring the EXIF Orientation tag, which makes rotated photos appear sideways in the browser.

• Whether you read EXIF Orientation and auto-rotate, or deliberately strip it
• Whether privacy-sensitive data such as GPS coordinates remains — stripping is mandatory for user-submitted images
• Whether both progressive and baseline JPEG decode correctly — older decoders sometimes fail on progressive