Compress an image to under 500KB
Get an image under 500KB in your browser. Enough for a full-resolution photo at high quality, which makes this the easy target.
KB here means 1,000 bytes, so a file under the number you set is under it whichever convention the form on the other end uses.
Drop JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, BMP files here or paste from the clipboard.
Your files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
Where this limit comes from
Half a megabyte is the limit on a lot of email systems per embedded image, on several forum and wiki platforms and in print-adjacent workflows where someone wants a proof rather than a master. It is also the figure people reach for when a colleague says a file is too big and nobody has specified what too big means.
What fits in 500 KB
Almost everything. Five hundred thousand bytes holds a full-resolution photograph from most phones at a quality setting in the eighties, which is to say a file you couldn’t distinguish from the original without a pixel-level comparison. Only very large images, scans and anything above about 20 megapixels need their dimensions reduced to get here.
The target most photos already meet
Worth checking before you do anything: a photo straight off a modern phone is often already under 500KB, because phones use HEIC and HEIC is efficient. If you drop one in and the tool hands it straight back, that is the check working rather than the tool failing.
The exception is anything that has been through an editor and saved at maximum quality, which routinely produces files several times larger than the original for no visible gain.
When 500KB is the wrong target
If the destination is a web page, this is too generous by a factor of three or four and the difference is invisible. If the destination is print, it is too mean: a printer wants the highest quality file you have and compressing to a size before sending one is throwing away the thing they need.
Compression targets belong to screens. For print, send the original.
Batch behaviour
Each file is searched independently, so a batch of mixed images lands at different qualities. That is correct: a flat product shot reaches 500KB at quality 95 while a dense landscape needs 70 and forcing both to the same setting would leave one of them worse than it had to be.
Common questions
Is 500KB small enough for a website?
For one hero image on an otherwise light page, yes. As a per-image budget across a gallery, no, because ten of them is five megabytes. If the destination is a web page, 100 to 200KB per image is the more useful target and the visual difference is usually nil.
Why is my scan still over 500KB?
Scans are large in both dimensions and detail and a scanned document full of text fights JPEG compression the same way a screenshot does. Reduce the dimensions to what you actually need, which for a readable A4 document is around 1,700 pixels on the long edge and the size falls dramatically.
Can I compress several images to 500KB each at once?
Yes. Drop the whole batch and each one is searched to the target independently, then offered as a single zip. The search runs per file because the quality needed to reach a given size depends entirely on that image's content.
Does compressing to a target remove the EXIF data?
Yes, as a side effect. Compression decodes the image to pixels and re-encodes it and metadata doesn’t survive that. If you want the metadata gone but the image untouched, use the EXIF remover instead, which rewrites the container without re-compressing anything.
Guides
Compress to a specific size
Each of these opens the tool with the target already set.