Compress Images for Real Estate Listings — Free, Fast & Private
Upload limits vary by portal and by MLS, and they change. This page will not quote you a number, because the number depends on which system you are feeding and any figure printed here would be out of date somewhere. Check your own portal’s help page for the current cap, then use the method below to hit it.
What does not vary is the shape of the problem. A property shoot is 30 to 60 exposures. A modern mirrorless camera writes 20–40 MB per frame. That is often close to a gigabyte for one listing, being pushed through a web form, frequently from a laptop tethered to a phone in a car between viewings.
2048px is the honest ceiling
Portal galleries display a photograph at, at most, the width of a desktop browser window — and the majority of property searching happens on phones, where the gallery is a few hundred points wide. A 2048 px JPEG covers a full-screen desktop lightbox with room to spare, and is indistinguishable from the 6000 px original in that context.
The exception worth respecting: if the same images are going into a printed brochure or a window card, keep a separate high-resolution set for print and compress only the web copies. Print at 300 DPI needs roughly 2500 px for a decent A5 image, more for A4 — compress once for the portal, archive the originals for the printer.
Interiors compress differently to exteriors
Interior photographs are usually wide-angle, evenly lit, and full of flat painted surfaces — which JPEG handles extremely efficiently. Exteriors carry sky gradients, foliage and brick texture, all of which cost bytes. In a mixed set you will see a 3× spread in output size from identical settings, and that is normal, not a fault.
Watch one thing specifically: gentle sky gradients are where JPEG banding shows up first, as visible steps in what should be a smooth wash. If a dusk exterior looks stepped after compression, that one image deserves the Gentle preset while the rest of the set stays on Smart.
Batch the shoot, not the photo
Per-image editing is not a workflow when you list several properties a week. Drop the entire folder in at once, set JPEG, Smart and 2048px, and download the set. A 900 MB shoot typically comes out somewhere around 15–25 MB in total, which uploads over a phone tether without drama and turns a portal timeout into a non-event.
Because MiniPx works in your browser, interior photographs of a client’s home — and any address metadata attached to them — never leave your device on the way to a compression service.
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