What to Do About Image Upload Size Limits?

The other day I was trying to upload a scanned business license to our company system. Got stuck for half the afternoon. The upload window kept saying "File size exceeds limit" and the original image was about 6MB. I tried uploading a few times, still no luck. Got pretty frustrated at that point and just thought, what now? Later I realized this is actually a pretty common issue—most platforms have some kind of size restriction.

Why does this keep happening?

Turns out almost every system has upload limits built in. Email usually caps out around 20-25MB, cloud storage might be higher, but work systems and official platforms are usually pretty strict—often just 2-5MB. I get it from the server side, big files do eat bandwidth. But from the user's end, sometimes you can't help it—especially if you're taking photos with a phone.

The straightforward solution is compression

To be honest, dealing with this comes down to one thing: compress the image. My approach now is to process the image before I upload it, instead of repeatedly hitting the upload button and hoping for the best.

There are really just two ways to compress an image. Either you reduce the dimensions, or you lower the quality. You can do one or the other, or both together. I usually just adjust the dimensions by themselves, unless I really need to preserve a lot of detail.

Like with that business license photo I mentioned—it was taken on my phone, so the resolution was really high. I just resized it down to around 1920 pixels wide using an online tool, and boom, it went from 6MB down to 1.5MB. Easy enough to upload after that. And honestly, after resizing it looked exactly the same to the naked eye.

Finding the right tool

There are plenty of compression tools out there. Photoshop is the most professional, but my computer can't handle it. Online tools like TinyPNG are super simple—just drag and drop and it automatically compresses—but the problem is you don't have control over the result. Sometimes it compresses too much, sometimes it's still too big, and you end up bouncing back and forth.

What I wanted was something simpler: just tell the tool "I need 2MB" and it automatically figures out the settings. That way I don't have to upload, check, delete, and redo it five times over.

Then I found ExactKB and it actually works pretty well. You set a target file size and it automatically adjusts the parameters for you. Upload an image, type in the size you need, click, and done. It also gives you a few options—you can choose to only adjust dimensions, only adjust quality, or both. I usually do both, since the compression effect is best that way.

There's also a useful little feature where you can set a minimum dimension limit. That way your image doesn't end up looking like a postage stamp. I usually set the width to stay above 1200 pixels so the image stays readable.

Back to reality

At the end of the day, handling image upload size limits is just about finding a way to make your file smaller. Sounds simple enough, but in practice you might need to try a few tools before you find one that fits your workflow. Some people are fine with TinyPNG's fully automatic approach, and some people like me want a bit more control. There's no single "best" solution—it depends on what you actually need.

I've been using this approach for dealing with image uploads and it's saved me a lot of time. Used to have to upload the same image five or six times until it finally stuck, but now I just handle it on my computer first and it goes through on the first try. If you're also running into this problem regularly, might be worth trying out this method.