How to compress image to 500 KB
- Tap Choose a photo and pick one image, or up to thirty.
- The target is already 500 KB. Tap Compress to 500 KB.
- Save the results — a batch gives you one file per photo.
Why a phone photo is six megabytes
A modern phone camera records far more pixels than any screen will show and stores them at a quality setting chosen for editing rather than for sending. A 12 megapixel photograph at the camera’s default is routinely four to eight megabytes, and almost none of that survives being viewed on a laptop, let alone in an email client that scales it to fit a column.
Compressing to 500 KB is mostly reclaiming that headroom. The tool searches for the highest quality that still fits rather than the smallest file it can make, so what you get back is the same picture with the unnecessary precision removed.
Sending several at once
Thirty images is the batch limit, and each one is measured against its own 500 KB target rather than the set being squeezed to fit collectively. They are processed one after another so a mid-range phone does not run out of memory holding all thirty decoded at once — which is also why the progress bar counts them out loud.