Compress Image to 500 KB – Keep Photos Sharp

Five hundred kilobytes is a comfortable limit. It is big enough to keep a photo sharp on a normal screen and a scanned page readable, and small enough for most upload forms, email programs and chat apps.

Many pictures that come straight from a phone are several megabytes. Getting them to 500 KB means removing a large part of the data, but most of what goes is detail that the eye cannot pick out at normal size.

Results depend on the picture. These are general guides, not promises:

• A phone photo of a person or a landscape usually reaches 500 KB with a small drop in quality that is hard to notice at normal size.
• A very large photo may also be made smaller in pixels. The card shows the new width and height, so you always know.
• A scan of a page with small print stays readable more often at 500 KB than at 100 KB, but zoom in on the smallest text to check.
• A picture with a lot of fine detail, such as leaves, hair or fabric, needs more room than a picture with a plain background.

• JPG works almost everywhere and is the safe choice for forms and email.
• WebP is often a little smaller than JPG at the same look, but not every website or older program accepts it.
• PNG keeps every pixel exactly, which is great for screenshots and graphics but makes photos large. When you set a target size, a PNG is saved as WebP or JPG instead, and the tool tells you.

This tool counts 1 KB as 1,024 bytes, so 500 KB is 512,000 bytes. Some websites count 1 KB as 1,000 bytes, and they would see your file as a little above 500 KB. If it ends up very close to the limit, enter 490 KB instead to leave some room.

Follow the size, the file type and the pixel size in the official notice for your form. They differ between forms and can change, and this page cannot tell you what yours needs.