Compress Image to 500KB
Cut a large phone photo down to 500KB or less, with enough pixels left for a small print.
What survives at 500KB
All eight of our sample photos kept their full 1,920 pixel width here, and six were already under 500KB, so they came back untouched. To see what happens to a bigger file, we enlarged the food photo to 12 megapixels (4,000 by 3,000). It came out at 2,653 by 1,990 and 496KB. A real phone photo has more fine detail than an enlarged copy, so expect somewhat fewer pixels than that.
Enough for a small print?
A 6 by 4 inch print at 300 pixels per inch needs 1,800 by 1,200 pixels. Everything in our tests stayed above that at this limit, so 500KB still leaves room for a small print. Keep the original for anything bigger.
JPG or WebP
Use JPG if the file is going to a form or to somebody else. WebP is worth trying on your own site, but it doesn't always fit more. At 100KB, WebP gave our portrait more pixels than JPG did (1,726 wide against 1,529) and gave the food photo fewer (889 against 981). Both ran at the same quality number, and that number doesn't mean the same thing in the two formats.
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