Compress an image to 500KB

At 500 kilobytes you are not really trading quality any more — you are just removing waste. Most photos meet this limit with room to spare.

Files never leave your browser

Drop images here or click to choose — every file comes out under 500 KB

This limit rarely costs you anything

A photograph straight out of a phone is typically 2 to 5 MB, and most of that is quality you cannot see: the camera writes at a very high JPEG setting to avoid throwing away anything it might need later. Bringing it to 500 KB usually means keeping the full pixel size and simply saving at a sane quality.

Use Compare on the result and switch to View 1:1. At real pixel size, on a normal photo, the two halves are almost always indistinguishable.

Where 500KB is the rule

Forum attachments, support-ticket uploads, and school or university submission systems land here often. So do some email systems, where the practical limit is not one image but twenty of them in the same message.

If you are attaching several files, note that this page processes a whole batch at once and each file is measured against the limit separately — so every one of them lands under 500 KB, not the total.

Already under 500KB?

Then nothing is done to it. If re-saving would produce a larger file than the one you gave — which happens when your original was already compressed harder than this limit needs — you get your original back instead, with its hidden metadata stripped out. The result will say already efficient. No tool should hand you back something bigger than what you started with.

Landing just under, not far under

Ask most tools for 500 KB and they hand back something far smaller. That looks like success and is really waste — every unused kilobyte was quality given away for nothing. This searches for the highest quality that still fits. Measured across 28 runs — the seven size limits on this site against four different pictures — nothing came back over the limit, and the results filled 96% of the budget on average.

Nothing is uploaded at any point — the work happens on your own device, which is also why there is no daily limit and no watermark. How that works, and how to check it yourself.

Other size limits

Set any other limit on the main compress page, or read how upload size limits actually work.