The usual limit for e-mail attachments on older corporate systems, and for images going into a document or a slide deck. This page opens the image compressor with the ceiling already set to 500 KB, so the only thing left to do is drop the picture in. The quality is searched rather than guessed at, and the resolution comes down only once quality on its own cannot reach the number. Almost always met on the first attempt. A photograph straight off a phone drops from eight or ten megabytes to this with nothing you would notice without the original beside it.
This runs in your browser. The file is not uploaded, there is no account to create, and nothing is added to the document you download.
Also searched for: compress image to 500kb, reduce photo size to 500kb, compress jpg to 500kb, make image less than 500 KB. It is the same tool whichever way you found it.
It is the easiest and most useful case there is. Phone photographs are routinely ten megabytes for a picture nobody will view larger than a screen, so this is a twentyfold saving for no visible cost — which is exactly the trade compression is supposed to be.
Then you are told so rather than handed a file that misses the mark quietly. The smallest version the ladder reached is offered instead, with its real size next to it, and you are never given something larger than what you put in — if nothing beats your original, you get your original back.
It is handed straight back, untouched. The ceiling is the whole requirement and it is already met, so re-encoding it would only spend quality to make a file that was already acceptable slightly smaller.
Only the file, until it has to change the picture. JPEG quality comes down first, which throws away detail the eye is worst at noticing; the pixel dimensions only shrink once quality alone cannot reach the number, and the notes say when that happened and what the image ended up as.
No. The file is opened, changed and written by this browser tab — it is never sent to a server, so there is no queue to wait in and nothing to delete afterwards. Once the page has loaded you can turn the network off and the tool still works.