Trimming rather than crushing
Files straight out of a camera or phone carry a great deal that contributes nothing to how the picture looks: embedded thumbnails, colour profiles, capture settings, and encoding chosen for speed rather than efficiency. Re-encoding discards all of it, and on many originals that alone gets close to five hundred kilobytes before quality has been touched meaningfully.
Because the budget is comfortable, this page leaves maximum width empty by default. The full resolution is preserved, which matters if the file will be printed or examined closely.
When something still refuses to fit
A very large panorama or a densely detailed scan can exceed five hundred kilobytes even at high quality. Two levers help, in this order: set a maximum width that still exceeds how the image will ever be displayed, and only then reduce quality. Lowering quality on a full resolution file is the more visible of the two.
Metadata leaves with the compression
Re-encoding produces a clean file with no metadata attached, which means the GPS coordinates, camera model and capture time your phone recorded are not carried into the version you upload. That is usually a benefit, particularly for anything posted publicly, but keep your original if you need that information later.
Questions
- Will 500KB preserve enough quality for printing?
- For a small print, often yes, provided you leave the maximum width empty so the pixel dimensions survive. Print quality depends far more on resolution than on file size. For anything large or professionally produced, supply the original file — compression is for transmission, not for archival.
- Does this remove the location data from my photos?
- Yes, as a side effect of re-encoding. The output carries no EXIF metadata at all, so the coordinates, camera details and timestamp are gone. Many people use this deliberately before posting pictures of their home or workplace publicly.
- Why does my 3MB photo drop to 500KB with no visible difference?
- Because most of those three megabytes were not carrying visible information. Cameras favour encoding speed over efficiency, and a considered re-encode achieves the same appearance in far less space. The comparison slider is there precisely so you can confirm that rather than take it on trust.
- Is half a megabyte a sensible ceiling for a batch of holiday pictures?
- It is generous for viewing on a screen and tight enough that forty pictures fit into twenty megabytes rather than a hundred and twenty. That makes it a reasonable choice for handing a folder to somebody, or for keeping a duplicate set on a phone with limited storage. Where the pictures might be printed or edited later, keep your untouched originals as well, since a reduction made for convenience cannot be reversed afterwards.