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Getting a PNG under 500 KB
A design export or a high-resolution screenshot saved as PNG is often 3 to 10 MB, because PNG never throws detail away. Most of that is colour precision nobody sees: reduced to 256 colours, the same image usually drops under 500 KB and stays a PNG, with text as sharp as before.
We try it at full size first and make it smaller in pixels only if 500 KB needs that. Transparent areas stay transparent.
Tips
- Zoom in on small text in the result before you upload it, in case the image had to be made smaller in pixels to fit.
- For a photo, export a JPEG from your design tool instead: photos shrink much better as JPEG than as PNG.
- Images with large flat areas of one color, like diagrams, shrink the most.
Questions
Will a 4K screenshot keep all its pixels at 500 KB?
It gets the chance. A 3840 x 2160 screenshot is about 8.3 million pixels. We render it at full size with 256 colours first, and only if that is over 500,000 bytes do we step the longest side down through 3500, 3000, 2600 pixels and so on, keeping the largest size that fits.
How does a PNG shrink to 500 KB and still stay a PNG?
Colour reduction does most of the work. pngquant picks the best 256 colours for the image and maps each pixel to one of them, so a pixel takes one byte instead of three or four before PNG's own compression. Each palette colour can carry its own transparency level, so soft shadows and smooth logo edges stay see-through.
Can every PNG I upload get under 500 KB?
Any PNG we accept can, by the last step at the latest. That step is 480 pixels on the longest side at 256 colours: at most 480 x 480 pixels of one byte each, about 230 KB before compression even starts. Larger sizes are tried first, so you get the biggest one that fits.
Related pages
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