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Your file is too big for the upload form — here's what to do

A short decision guide for PDFs, photos and scans that a form refuses: what actually makes a file heavy, what to try first, and what to avoid.

· 2 min read

Most upload forms cap files at 2 MB or 5 MB; email attachments usually stop at 20–25 MB. The fix depends on what kind of file you have, and the right move is almost never "compress harder".

Start with the right question

Your file What makes it heavy Try first
A scanned PDF The scan images inside it Compress PDF, recommended level
A PDF exported from a document Embedded photos and logos Compress the images, then re-export
A phone or camera photo The number of pixels Resize Image to 1600–1920 px
A photo that must hit an exact limit — Reduce Image Size in KB
A very long PDF Page count Split PDF and send it in parts

For photos, resize before you compress

Lowering JPEG quality is the obvious lever, but it's the weaker one. Pixels are what cost bytes: a 4000 × 3000 photo has 12 million pixels; at 1920 × 1440 it has 2.8 million — about a quarter as many — and the picture still fills any laptop screen. Resize first, then lower the quality if you still need to.

Going the other way, pushing quality below about 60 produces visible blocks around text and edges, which is exactly what makes a scanned ID unreadable to the person reviewing it.

For scanned PDFs, expect a big win

A colour A4 page scanned at 600 DPI can weigh several megabytes on its own. Strong compression re-renders pages at 80–150 DPI, which is plenty for reading on screen, and often divides the size by 5 to 10. The trade-off is real and worth knowing: the text becomes part of the image, so it can no longer be selected or searched. For a contract you will need to quote from, keep the lossless option or the original.

When the form still says no

Check the other requirements before compressing again. Portals frequently impose all of these at once:

  • an exact format (JPG only, or PDF only);
  • fixed dimensions, for example 600 × 800 px for a photo;
  • a minimum size as well as a maximum — 20 KB to 50 KB is a common range;
  • a maximum number of pages.

A file that meets the size limit but not the dimensions is rejected with the same unhelpful message.

What not to do

Don't rename the extension. Renaming photo.png to photo.jpg changes nothing inside the file; a well-built form detects it and rejects the upload.

Don't compress the same file twice. Each JPEG pass re-encodes what the previous one already degraded. Go back to the original and do it once, properly.

Don't zip it. PDFs, JPGs and PNGs are already compressed, so a ZIP saves almost nothing — and most forms won't accept an archive anyway.

All the tools linked here run in your browser, so identity documents and contracts stay on your device.

Tools used in this guide

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