The form is clear: Maximum file size: 5 MB. Your export is 17.4 MB. You are not building a media company. You are trying to submit one document before a deadline.
This is one of the most common upload failures on the modern web — and one of the least well-served by “free compressors” that bury the download behind signup walls.
Why Limits Exist
Portals cap uploads to control storage costs, email attachment pipelines, malware scanning time, and ancient server configs. The number is arbitrary from your point of view. From theirs, 5 MB (or 2 MB, or 500 KB) is a hard gate.
What Actually Shrinks a File
For photos and screenshots, size comes from resolution × quality:
- Lower JPEG quality (e.g. 90 → 75) often cuts size dramatically with little visible change on a form photo
- Resize dimensions if the image is 4000 px wide and the form only displays 800 px
- Convert HEIC/PNG to JPEG when the portal allows JPG — PNG screenshots are often huge for no benefit
For PDFs and video, the levers are different (re-encode, downsample, strip embeds). Image recompression is still the pain that shows up most often in everyday uploads.
Name the constraint, not the algorithm
People do not want “compression.” They want: make this under 5 MB. That is why we ship Under-X MB as a $1 utility — you set the max, it iterates quality/scale until it fits.
A Sensible Manual Approach
- Note the exact limit (2 MB? 5 MB? 10 MB?)
- If it’s HEIC, convert to JPG first
- Resize to the largest dimension the form plausibly needs
- Export JPEG and check file size; reduce quality in steps until under the cap
- If they also demand exact pixels (e.g. 600×600), use an exact image fit instead of guessing
When You Should Not Crush Quality
Passport photos, medical scans, and legal exhibits have readability requirements. Stay above ~70 JPEG quality when text or faces must remain sharp. If you cannot hit the limit without destroying the content, split pages or ask the recipient for an alternate channel — but try a smart recompress first. Most “too large” phone photos have headroom.
The Takeaway
The limit is the product. Optimize to the number. Use Under-X MB for $1 when you do not want to run the quality loop by hand, or start from the tools hub if you also need HEIC conversion or dimension fixes.