Compress Image to 500 KB
Drop any photo, screenshot or scan and it comes back as a JPEG under 500 KB — at the highest quality that still fits. The whole search runs in your browser.
Where 500 KB comes from
500 KB is less often a rule than a habit: the size a photo should be before you attach it to an email, put it in a forum post, or hand it to a CMS that will happily serve a 6 MB original to every visitor on a phone. Nobody is checking, but the difference between a page that loads and one that does not is made of decisions like this one.
What it costs to get under 500 KB
Practically every photograph keeps its full resolution here. A 12-megapixel frame typically lands in the high seventies for quality, which is the range where a side-by-side comparison at 100% shows nothing to argue about. If you are doing this for a website rather than an email, note that WebP or AVIF would hold the same picture in roughly half the bytes — the pair pages for those formats are linked below.
Why this one is different
Hitting an exact ceiling takes eight to ten trial encodes. A hosted compressor pays for every one of them on every visitor, so it guesses a quality once and hands back whatever that produced. This one runs the search properly, because the processor it runs on is yours.
Compress to a different size
Change the format instead
Questions
How do I compress an image to 500 KB?
Drop your images onto the box above. Each one is re-encoded as a JPEG that lands under 500 KB, using the highest quality that still fits, and the row underneath says what quality that was and whether the image had to be resized. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.
Will anyone be able to tell?
Not at this ceiling, on a normal photograph, at any size a screen will show it. JPEG discards what the eye was least likely to be using, and at quality 75 and above there is not much of that left to notice.
Can I do a whole folder at once?
Yes. Drop the lot in, and every file is compressed to the same ceiling and offered back as a single ZIP. There is no limit on how many, because there is no server to pay for them — the work happens in this tab, on your processor.
Do my files get uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything happens in this tab. Your files are never sent to a server, which is why this still works if you disconnect from the network after the page has loaded — and why there is no limit on how many you put through it.