Compress image to 500 KB

Half a megabyte keeps a photo at nearly full phone resolution with excellent JPEG quality. It is also the bottom of the range Instagram tolerates best, which is why the Instagram presets on the homepage start at 500 KB. Use this page when a site tells you the upload is too large but you still want the photo to look untouched.

At 500 KB you can expect up to about 2000 px on the long side. The exact number depends on how much fine detail the image has: skies and plain walls compress well, foliage and fabric don't.

1. Drop or paste the image. Nothing is uploaded; the work happens in your browser, even offline.
2. The tool encodes the image as JPEG at several quality levels and keeps the one that lands just under 500 KB.
3. If even the lowest acceptable quality is too big, it reduces the pixels a little and tries again, so the result is the largest image that fits.
4. Download the file, or share it straight into WhatsApp or the form on a phone.

Every result shows the final size and pixel dimensions before you download. Need a fixed pixel size too? Set Resize to Exact size (crop) and type the width and height.

This limit is common for email attachments, blog posts, LinkedIn articles and forums with a 500 KB cap. If the portal also lists a minimum size (for example "20 KB to 50 KB"), open More options and fill in Min (KB): the tool pads the JPEG so it is never rejected for being too small, without touching the pixels.