Compress an image under 500KB
"Maximum 500 KB" is one of the most common upload rules on government and finance sites. This page explains why they use that limit and shows the fastest way to hit it exactly, without turning your photo into mush.
For anyone facing an upload form — job applications, visa portals, banking sites, school submissions — that rejects anything above 500 KB.
Auto-tunes quality until the output is just under 500 KB. Works with JPG, PNG, WEBP and HEIC.
Step-by-step
- Open the 500KB compressor above.
- Drop the photo in. HEIC from an iPhone is converted automatically.
- Leave the target at 500 KB. The tool will iterate quality until it lands just under the limit.
- Preview the result — for most 12 MP phone photos the compressed version is visually identical.
- Download and upload to the form.
Common mistakes to avoid
- •Guessing at a quality slider (75%, 60%, 40%…) and re-exporting until the file is small enough. That is what the auto-target does for you in one pass.
- •Resizing to 640×480 to force a small file. Modern forms often reject anything under 800 px on the long side.
- •Screenshotting the photo to shrink it. Screenshots lose EXIF but also throw away image quality.
- •Uploading a 4 MB HEIC to a form that only accepts JPG. Convert first, compress second.
Prefer JPG when the form allows it — you'll hit 500 KB at higher resolution and quality than with PNG. Only switch to PNG when the form requires it (usually for signatures or scans of black-on-white documents).
The compressor runs in your browser using the Canvas API. Your document or photo is never uploaded to us — only to the destination site when you're ready.