Phone photos are often several megabytes each. Attach a dozen to an email and the message can be too big to send, or slow to arrive for someone on mobile data. At 500 KB, a photo still looks good on any screen, and many more fit in one message.
This page is set up to resize an image to 500 KB, which here means its file size, not its shape. Target size is already set, so the tool finds the best quality that fits. Select a whole set at once, check the result in the split view, and save them together as a ZIP. Everything runs in your browser, so your photos are never uploaded to us.
Why 500 KB suits email and sharing
500 KB is a comfortable middle. It is small enough that a set of photos travels easily, and big enough that a photo looks sharp when it fills a laptop screen. It suits:
- email photos from a holiday, a party or a site visit to family, friends or colleagues;
- forms and portals with a 500 KB limit per picture, such as a gallery, a listing or a club website;
- chat groups and shared folders where you want to share photos without filling everyone's storage;
- reports and newsletters that hold several photos and must stay under an attachment size limit.
For printing, keep your originals: 500 KB is for screens. For a stricter upload limit, such as a web page, see compress an image to 200 KB; for a looser one, compress an image to 1 MB.
How to compress an image to 500 KB
- Press Select images and choose your photos, up to 100 at once. iPhone HEIC photos open too.
- Check that Compress by shows Target size, set to 500 KB.
- Keep Format on Original. JPG stays JPG, and a HEIC photo is saved as a JPG, which almost any device opens.
- Look at the first photo in the split view, and read the Result line, for example JPG · 4032 × 3024 · 487 KB · 84% smaller.
- Press Compress, for example Compress 24 pictures, then Save all as ZIP.
The tool tries up to 8 quality levels for each photo and keeps the highest one under 500 KB. If even the lowest is too big, Allow a smaller picture size makes that photo smaller in pixels as well. A KB here is 1,000 bytes, so a result under 500 KB is also under a 500 KB limit counted in 1,024s.
Mixed sets are fine. A photo that is already under 500 KB and stays in its own format is kept no bigger than it is now, and the panel says so when that photo is on show. Screenshots and older photos in a set often fall into this group, so they pass through almost unchanged in size.
How many photos fit in one email?
Every email service sets its own attachment size limit, and it can change, so check yours. Attachments are also encoded for sending, which makes them about a third bigger on the way. Leave room for that, and the sums look like this:
| If your limit is | Photos at 500 KB | Photos straight from a phone, at about 3 MB |
|---|---|---|
| 10 MB | About 15 | About 2 |
| 20 MB | About 30 | About 5 |
| 25 MB | About 37 | About 6 |
When you compress an image to 500 KB, the sums are easy: two photos per megabyte, before encoding. For more photos than the table shows, send them over two or three messages, or put them in a shared folder. Either way, compressed photos upload faster and use less of the recipient's data when they open them.
What 500 KB does to a photo
For most phone photos, 500 KB at full size means a good quality, and on a screen the change is hard to see. Press 100% under the picture and use Hold to compare to check fine detail, such as leaves, hair and text on signs.
The colours are saved as standard sRGB, which every screen shows the same way. Photos from phones that record wider colour can shift slightly, so very vivid reds and greens may look a touch calmer. For family photos on a laptop or a phone, this rarely matters.
If a photo looks soft, it is probably very detailed or very large. Switch on Also make it smaller in pixels and set a Longest side of about 2400. That is still larger than most screens, and the photo then fits at a higher quality. Photos people will only see on a phone can go to 1600.
On the done screen, every row shows the photo's new size and how much smaller it is, so you can see what the set will weigh before you attach it. A photo that could not reach 500 KB, which is rare at this size, still gets the closest result and says so in red.
WebP or AVIF under Format would give more quality for the same 500 KB. For email, though, JPG is the kinder choice: everyone can open it, on any device, without thinking about it.
Send a set without sending your location
Photos from a phone often hold the exact place they were taken, along with the date and the phone model. If you email photos straight from the camera roll, those details go with them. Every photo compressed here is drawn fresh, so it carries no location, camera or date details.
- Want to share photos at their full quality but without the location? Use Remove location from photo instead: on a JPG, it changes nothing else.
- To take out every detail without compressing, use Remove EXIF data.
- To change iPhone photos to JPG without compressing them, use HEIC to JPG.
Your own files are never changed here, and the compressed copies end in _compressed, so if someone asks for the originals later, you still have them. The photos never leave your browser while they are compressed. It is free, with no account and no watermark, and it works in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
Get your photos under 500 KB now
To compress an image to 500 KB for email, select the whole set, keep Format on Original or JPG, and let Target size find the best quality for each photo. Save them as a ZIP and send them in one message, without the location inside.
Select your photos above and press Compress. The full image compressor has every other size.
