Compress an image to 500 KB
A relaxed limit, often used for email attachments or upload caps.
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
500 KB rarely requires much visible compromise; it's the kind of limit set by an email provider or an upload form to stop truly oversized files, not to force heavy compression. A photo of four megapixels fits at high quality. A twelve-megapixel phone photo fits too, at a medium setting, and looks better still if you first resize it to the width it will be shown at.
If a batch of photos is going by email, consider the "Download all (ZIP)" option after compressing them together, so the recipient gets one attachment instead of several, which many mail providers handle better.
Your photos are uploaded over an encrypted connection, we do not keep the originals, and the results are deleted automatically within one hour. At this size, most of the work is really about catching unusually large originals; a typical phone photo often needs very little compression to land comfortably under 500 KB. It's a good habit to spot-check one result at normal size before trusting the same setting across a whole batch of similar photos.
Half a megabyte, in pixels
A screen-filling picture on a Full HD monitor is 1920 by 1080, about two megapixels. At 500 KB such a picture can be stored at a quality where nobody will find a flaw. Even a 4K frame of eight megapixels fits, at a setting in the fifties that still holds up on photographs. Beyond that the budget is spread thin, and reducing the dimensions gives a cleaner picture than pushing the quality down.
Scanned pages under 500 KB
A lot of 500 KB limits are about paperwork: contracts, invoices, certificates, pages of a passport. An A4 sheet scanned at 150 dots per inch is 1240 by 1754 pixels and fits with ease. At 300 dots per inch it is 2480 by 3508, nearly nine megapixels, and still fits, because paper is mostly one flat tone.
Two settings help with scans. Black and white removes the yellowish cast of the paper and the bytes spent describing it. And PNG or WebP keep small print sharper than JPEG does, which matters when someone has to read a stamp or a serial number.
Send one file or several small ones?
Portals with a 500 KB cap usually apply it per file, while mail servers count the whole message. If you are uploading five documents to a form, each one gets its own 500 KB and you can keep the quality high. If the same five go into one email, they share whatever the mail server allows. Compress the whole batch here in one go, look at the total size of the batch, and you know where you stand before pressing Send.
Frequently asked questions
Why compress to 500 KB if it's already a loose limit?
Smaller files upload and load faster, and many email providers cap total attachment size, not just one file.
Will this affect photo quality?
At 500 KB, usually not noticeably for typical photos.
Can I download all my compressed photos together?
Yes, as a single ZIP file once more than one photo is finished.
What's the difference between this and the 1 MB target?
Only the limit; use whichever matches the rule you're working against.
Will a 500 KB photo still print well?
Up to about 13 by 18 centimetres, yes, provided the pixel dimensions were not reduced much. For larger prints keep the original and send that to the lab.
Can a PNG screenshot be brought under 500 KB?
Nearly always. Screenshots are flat colour and text, which is what PNG's colour reduction handles best. One from a high-resolution laptop screen typically drops from a few megabytes to a few hundred kilobytes.