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Compress image to 500 KB

Set the budget, and the encoder is searched for the best quality that fits under 500 KB. On your device — the image is never uploaded.

  • 0 uploads
  • No limits
  • No signup
  • Works offline

Where a 500 KB limit comes from

Nobody chooses 500 KB for fun. If you are here, a form told you to, and the form probably did not explain how. These are the places this particular number turns up:

  • Email attachments where the total must stay small
  • Print-adjacent uploads that still cap file size
  • Bulk uploads where dozens of images share a quota

Half a megabyte is enough for a 3000-pixel image at high quality. This is a size limit rather than a compression exercise.

What 500 KB actually buys you

Half a megabyte is a size limit rather than a compression exercise. A 3000-pixel image fits at high quality, so if you are struggling to get under 500 KB the cause is almost never the encoder — it is that the file is not what you think it is.

The usual culprits: a PNG holding a photograph, which can be five to ten times larger than the equivalent JPEG for no visible gain; an image saved at 600 dpi for a screen; or a camera raw conversion carrying an embedded full-size preview. Check the format and the dimensions before touching the quality slider, because one of them is probably the whole problem.

Almost always achievable at maximum quality. The search here spends the budget on dimensions before quality — a larger image at quality 55 beats a smaller one at 95, because the eye forgives artefacts more readily than missing resolution.

Getting a better result

Three things reliably help when the budget is tight:

  • Crop before compressing. Every pixel you keep costs bytes. A tightly framed portrait at 500 KB looks far better than a full-body shot squeezed into the same space. The cropper hands its result straight to this tool.
  • Start from the highest-quality original you have. Compressing an image that has already been through WhatsApp compounds the damage. Go back to the file straight off the camera.
  • Prefer WebP if the form allows it. At the same file size WebP holds noticeably more detail than JPEG. Most official forms still want JPG, but it costs nothing to check.

Other common targets

10 KB · 20 KB · 30 KB · 50 KB · 100 KB · 150 KB · 200 KB · 300 KB

How it works

  1. 01Add your imageDrop it on the page, click to browse, or paste from the clipboard.
  2. 02The 500 KB target is already setYou landed on this page, so the budget is filled in. Change it if you need something different.
  3. 03The search runsThe encoder is run repeatedly, binary-searching quality for the best result that still fits under 500 KB.
  4. 04Compare, then downloadDrag the before/after slider to see what the compression cost before you commit.

Questions people actually ask

My image will not go under 500 KB. What is wrong?
Check whether it is a PNG. A photograph stored as PNG is routinely several times the size of the same picture as a JPEG, and no amount of optimisation closes that gap because PNG is lossless by design. Convert to JPEG or WebP first, then compress — the target usually stops being a problem entirely.
Will my photo still look acceptable at 500 KB?
Half a megabyte is enough for a 3000-pixel image at high quality. This is a size limit rather than a compression exercise. Almost always achievable at maximum quality.
Is the result exactly 500 KB?
It lands within about 5% below 500 KB, and never above it. Going over would defeat the point — a form that says "maximum 500 KB" rejects a file of 501 KB without explanation.
Is my image uploaded to reach 500 KB?
No. Every encode in the search runs on your own device, in a background thread, using WebAssembly builds of MozJPEG and libwebp.

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