Why 500 KB?
Half a megabyte is a practical ceiling for a photo that people will look at on a screen. It’s big enough to fill a laptop display with detail and small enough that a page full of them still loads on a patchy mobile connection. That’s why it shows up so often:
- Property and rental listings, where you might upload 20 photos per home
- Marketplace and classified ads with per-image limits
- Your own website or blog, where every image counts towards page speed
- Online forms for permits, warranty claims and support tickets
How we hit the target
For each photo we look for the highest quality that comes in under 500,000 bytes. The search starts at 85 and won’t go below about 55. Only when quality alone can’t get there do we reduce the pixel dimensions, and then just enough to fit.
Because sizes use decimal units, a “max 500 KB” form will accept the result whether it counts in 1,000s or 1,024s.
Listing photos: a quick workflow
- Shoot in landscape. Listing sites tend to display wide.
- Straighten anything sideways with Rotate HEIC, so every photo shows upright in the gallery.
- Drop the whole set here and download one ZIP.
- Upload your best shot first. Most listing sites use the first photo as the thumbnail.
Location data and listings
This one is easy to forget. Photos taken at a property can carry the exact GPS coordinates of where they were shot. That’s harmless for a house you’re selling publicly, less so for photos taken at your own home for a marketplace ad. Location is removed by default here, so you don’t have to think about it.
JPG or WebP for the web?
| JPG | WebP | |
|---|---|---|
| Accepted by upload forms | Nearly all | Some |
| Size at the same quality | Larger | Smaller |
| Best for | Forms, listings, email | Your own website |
Running your own site? See converting HEIC for website upload for sizing advice, or go straight to HEIC to WebP.
All in the tab, nothing in the cloud
There’s no server doing the work, so there’s nothing to wait for in a queue. Your CPU does the compressing, in parallel across its cores, and the photos never leave the page.