Runs on your device
Compress an image to 500 KB.
The size where you generally stop losing pixels — quality alone gets there, and your dimensions stay untouched.
Quality is searched automatically. If quality alone can't get under the limit, dimensions step down too.
1 image · drop more here
or drop them here · JPG, PNG and WebP
- Original
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- Compressed
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- Saved
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Compression settings
What must it fit under?
Limits & output
Leave empty to keep the original dimensions. Aspect ratio is always preserved.
JPEG has no transparency — transparent areas are filled with white.
Choosing a format
- JPEG
- The safest choice for photographs, and the one most forms and older software expect. No transparency — transparent areas become white.
- WebP
- The sensible default for the web. Roughly 25–35% smaller than JPEG at matching perceived quality, and it keeps transparency.
- PNG
- Lossless. Keep it for flat graphics, screenshots with text, and anything that must stay pixel-exact. Avoid it for photographs, where it is often larger than the original camera file.
AVIF is smaller still, but it is slow to encode and not yet universal, so it is not offered here. The guide below goes into more detail.
Results
Compressing to 500 KB
The point where dimensions stop shrinking
Something changes around 500 KB. For most photographs, encoder quality on its own is enough to reach the target, so the picture keeps every pixel it started with. Below this figure the tool eventually has to give up dimensions as well; at 500 KB it usually does not have to touch them.
What you get, then, is a full-resolution image carrying less detail per pixel. Inspected at 100% zoom against the original you will find the difference — slightly softer edges, a little less texture in shadow. At any normal viewing size, on any screen, it is genuinely hard to see.
That makes this a good ceiling when the pixel dimensions themselves matter: an image somebody may crop into later, a product shot that needs to survive a zoom control, anything where losing resolution would be worse than losing a little fidelity.
Where a 500 KB rule comes from
It is rarely a hard upload cap. More often it is a convention — a media library, a marketplace listing, a mail signature, some place where a sensible person decided that nobody needs to be served four-megabyte photographs and wrote the number down.
Worth saying plainly: 500 KB is generous for a web page. An image at that weight is among the heaviest things on most sites, and on a phone connection the delay is noticeable. If the destination is a website rather than an inbox or a form, aim considerably lower — somewhere between 150 and 250 KB is a more honest target for anything above the fold.
Batches are where the figure really bites. Twenty listing photographs at 500 KB is 10 MB, which plenty of mail gateways still refuse outright and most recipients would rather not receive. If you are sending a set, the arithmetic matters more than any individual file does.
Other limits, same tool: 100 KB, 200 KB, 1 MB. Or read the full guide to formats, quality and file size.
Frequently asked questions
Will 500 KB change my image dimensions?
Usually not. For the large majority of photographs the quality search reaches 500 KB on its own, leaving the pixel dimensions exactly as they were. Dimensions only come down when quality alone cannot get under the limit, which at this size is uncommon — a very large or very detailed original being the exception.
Is 500 KB small enough for a website?
It is acceptable, not good. A single 500 KB image is one of the heaviest elements on a typical page, and several of them will be felt on a mobile connection. For web use specifically, 150 to 250 KB is the range worth aiming at, and WebP will get you there with less visible cost than JPEG.
How many 500 KB images can I attach to an email?
Most mail systems accept somewhere between 10 and 25 MB per message, so twenty to forty in principle. In practice, send fewer: recipients on phones download the lot, and shared mailboxes fill up. If you are sending a large set regularly, a lower ceiling costs you almost nothing visible.
Can I apply 500 KB to a whole folder at once?
Yes. Every file is searched separately against the same limit, so each one lands just under 500 KB with the best quality it can manage rather than sharing a single setting. Take them one by one or download the batch as a ZIP.