The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus and method in which the image recording time is reduced and the memory capacity required for compression is also reduced. A number-of-bytes calculation unit 302 determines the number of bytes after compression based on an integrated value of high-frequency integrated data supplied from a high-frequency integration processor. Based on the determined number of bytes, a Q-scale calculation unit 303 determines a Q-scale based on which the image data can be compressed one time to a predetermined data size. A Q-table generation unit 304 generates a Q-table based on the Q-scale. A DCT unit 321 performs a discrete cosine transform on the input image data. A quantization processor 322 adjusts the compression ratio of the image data based on the up-to-date Q-table supplied from the Q-table generation unit 304. A variable-length coding processor 323 encodes the image data with variable length coding such as Huffman coding, and outputs the resulting compressed image data. The present invention is applicable to digital cameras.