Image Compressor
Drag the quality slider and watch the file size shrink in real time.
Drop images to compress
or click to browse, or paste with Ctrl/Cmd+V — drop several at once to process a whole batch
Preview
Compression settings
Type a budget and the tool searches for the highest quality that fits, in at most eight encodes.
Batch queue
Where 500 KB comes from
Five hundred kilobytes is the forum, wiki and CMS number. Discourse installations, MediaWiki, a great many WordPress hosts and most ticketing systems land somewhere near it, because it is generous enough for a real photograph and small enough that a busy thread does not become a bandwidth problem.
For most images this is a budget you can hit without visible loss. A twelve megapixel photo compressed to 500 KB is roughly a quality of sixty to seventy — detectable if you pixel-peep a fine texture, invisible at the size anyone will actually look at it. The compare slider on this page is the fastest way to confirm that for your particular image rather than taking it on trust.
If your file is a screenshot rather than a photograph, be careful with this budget. Screenshots are full of hard edges and flat colour, which is exactly what lossy compression handles worst — text goes fuzzy long before a landscape does. Compare at 1:1 zoom before you commit.
How to compress an image to 500 KB
- Drop your image on the panel above — or paste it, or drop a whole folder to do the lot at once.
- The 500 KB budget is already set. Change it if you need something different.
- The tool searches for the highest quality that fits and tells you what it settled on and how many encodes it took.
- Drag the divider across the preview to see the original against the result, and switch to 1:1 zoom to judge the artifacts at real pixel scale.
- Download. Nothing was uploaded at any point — the whole thing ran on your own machine.
Questions
Will 500 KB visibly damage a photo?
Rarely, for an ordinary photograph viewed at normal size. Fine texture — foliage, fabric weave, film grain — is where you will see it first. Use the 1:1 zoom on the compare slider to check the area you care about.
Why does my screenshot look worse at 500 KB than my photo does?
Because lossy compression is built for photographs. Screenshots are hard edges and flat colour, which is the case JPEG and WebP handle worst — text develops a halo long before a landscape shows anything. For screenshots, PNG at full size is often smaller anyway.
