Compress PNG to 500KB
Compress PNG to 500KB online. Reduce your PNG file to around 500KB for email, uploads and forms, free, fast, no watermark.
Up to 50 MB per file. Sign up free to compress files up to 100 MB.
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Checking files and selected compression settings.
This page stops at 50 MB and one file per run. Pro compresses files up to 1 GB and a full batch in one go, with a priority queue.
What reaching 500 KB costs a PNG
Set 500 KB as the target and the engine works down to it in steps, stopping at the first result that fits rather than padding the file back out.
Resampling comes first, at full colour, because a palette costs more than a few pixels do. Only when scaling alone cannot reach the target is the image reduced to a 256-colour palette. Transparency survives either way: an alpha channel goes in and comes out.
Files are processed on our servers, not in your browser. The upload and the result are both permanently deleted within 1 hour, no backups and no copies kept.
No watermark, and no account needed to use it. 2 files a day at up to 50 MB each, sent singly or together; signing in is free and raises each file to 100 MB.
Spending the whole allowance
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1
Ask for 500 rather than something tidier
If the destination accepts 500 KB, there is no prize for handing it 180 KB. Every kilobyte of headroom goes directly into how many colours and how many pixels survive, so a smaller request just means a worse picture for no gain.
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2
Submit it at native resolution
At this allowance the pixel grid is rarely the thing that has to give. Upload the file as your capture tool or export produced it and let the encoder work on the colour count instead.
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Hunt for dither in the flat regions
Quantising scatters dots through smooth areas to imitate the colours it no longer has. Large plain backgrounds and soft shadows are where that stippling shows. At this target it should be absent, and if you can find it the source has more colour variety than any PNG target will hold.
The generous target, and the ceiling behind it
500 KB is the roomy end of PNG compression. Amazon Seller Central and Flipkart Seller Hub take product images up to this figure before their own re-encoding begins, and Slack shows a PNG inline in a thread up to the same number. For images carrying hundreds of distinct colours it is also the first target that does not force the palette down far enough to produce visible banding.
What the colour count is actually doing
The only real dial on a PNG is how many distinct colours the file is allowed to contain. Going from truecolour to 256 indexed entries removes a lot of weight cheaply. Going below that, to 16 entries or fewer, is where smooth tonal areas collapse into stepped bands and the encoder starts dithering to disguise them.
At tighter targets that collapse is unavoidable. Reaching 100 KB from a scanned signature typically means posterising it to around eight colours, which is fine for ink on paper and ruinous for anything shaded. A 500 KB budget keeps the reduction modest enough that a dashboard with charts, photographs and a dozen interface themes in one frame comes through without stepping.
There is a width cap you will hit before 500 KB
Every image here is limited to 1920 px on the long edge. That means some sources cannot reach 500 KB at all. The measured 2560x1440 screenshot of 1.7 MB comes back at 388 KB, at 1905x1071, because once it is inside the width cap and holding a full palette there is nothing left to spend the remaining 112 KB on.
This has a useful consequence. The same file asked for 1 MB returns the identical 388 KB result, so for a screen capture of ordinary desktop resolution, 500 KB and 1 MB are the same request. The targets above this one only matter for very large exports and images with unusually rich colour.
A fair number of these files want another format
If the image is a photograph, the format is the problem and no target fixes it. A press kit product render at 2000 to 3000 px typically weighs 1 to 3 MB as a PNG, and the same picture as a JPG or a lossy WebP reaches a fraction of that while looking the same. Lossless WebP is roughly 26 percent smaller than PNG even on flat graphics, so where the destination reads WebP it is the better choice regardless of content.
If a form or portal states 200 KB, compress to 200 KB rather than producing a 500 KB file and squeezing it again afterwards. Two passes of palette reduction give a worse result than one pass aimed at the real limit, because the second pass is quantising a palette that has already been quantised.
Frequently asked questions
Etsy allows 5 MB. Is there any point compressing to 500 KB?
Yes, because the published limit is not where the processing starts. Etsy re-encodes listing images above roughly 600 KB, so sending a 3 MB PNG means the version shoppers see was compressed by Etsy rather than by you. Going in under 500 KB keeps your own encoding as the one that ships.
My product shot has a transparent background. Does that cost extra?
It does. Alpha is a fourth channel stored per pixel, so the same product photographed on transparency is heavier than the same product on white. That is a large part of why seller listings belong on this target rather than a tighter one, and why the transparency is worth keeping rather than flattening.
Why is my 500 KB PNG worse looking than a 150 KB JPG of the same picture?
Because the picture is photographic. PNG has to store something for every pixel and cannot discard detail selectively, so it spends its budget on resolution and colour count rather than on perceived quality. A continuous tone image belongs on the JPG or WebP tools, where a 150 KB file genuinely can look better than a 500 KB PNG.
Can I run a file through twice if the first result is still too big?
You can, but go back to the original instead. PNG encoding itself loses nothing, yet the palette reduction used to hit a target is not reversible, and a second reduction compounds the banding from the first. One pass from the source file aimed at the number you need always beats two.