Compress Image to 500 KB

How to compress an image to 500 KB

500 KB keeps a photo large and sharp — roughly 2,000 to 2,500 pixels on the long side at a high JPG quality. It is a sensible size for emailing photos someone might still print small, and a common limit on job, school and rental application portals. The tool starts at up to 2,560 pixels and finds the highest quality that fits.

1. Choose or drop one or more images above (on a phone, tap the box to pick from your gallery).
2. Leave the target at 500 KB, or type your form's exact limit into Custom target.
3. Each image is compressed on your device; the result shows its exact size and a green tick when it fits.
4. Download one file, or all of them as a ZIP.

Where the 500 KB limit comes up

Email attachments and high-quality uploads. Typical places:

• Emailing photos without hitting attachment limits
• Portals that accept up to 500 KB per image
• Portfolio and gallery uploads
• Sharing photos in chat apps without their own compression

What fits in 500 KB

Most photos fit at 2,000–2,500 px on the long edge with quality above 80.

Watch out: Ten 500 KB photos make a 5 MB email — fine for most mail services, but some workplace servers reject messages above 10 MB in total. Check the whole message, not just each photo.

How the tool decides

It first tries a high quality at the largest size allowed. If that is too big, it searches for the highest JPG (or WebP) quality that still fits. Only when quality would have to drop below about 50 does it reduce the pixel dimensions instead, because a slightly smaller sharp photo looks better than a full-size blocky one. The target is treated as 500,000 bytes so it passes checks that count a kilobyte as either 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.

Need an exact pixel size too? Resize first with the image resizer or crop with the image cropper, then compress here. For the background on why photos are so large, read the image compression guide or how to reduce image size for email.