Notion File Upload Limit: Fix “File Too Large” on a Mac

On Notion’s Free plan every uploaded file must be under 5 MB, and on a paid plan files can reach 5 GB each. Notion’s help center states both, and the limit is per file, not per workspace.

Notion’s help page also carries a note that PDFs must be under 20 MB and images (PNG, JPG) under 5 MB, which does not match its own 5 GB paid figure. If you are on a paid plan and a file is refused, trust the error, not the table, and compress it. All figures were read on 11 October 2026 and limits change, so confirm in your workspace.

Compress it on your Mac until the output is under 5 MB, then upload the copy. The right lever depends on the file: a preset for a PDF, quality and pixel size for an image.

Smol sets quality and pixel size, not output bytes, so it cannot promise a file lands under a cap. Run it, read the size in the results list, and step down one setting if the file is still over. The one exception is target-size mode for images, which aims at a size you type (4 to 4,096 KB) as a band rather than a ceiling, and takes about 28 seconds for one 768 × 512 image.

How much will a PDF shrink?

It depends on how the PDF was made. Scans and exports from design tools compress well; some generators, ReportLab among them, barely move. PDF presets are long-edge pixel caps (600, 900, 1200, 1800 and 2400 px for Tiny to Original), not DPI targets, so a page’s effective resolution depends on its size. Our explanation of the PDF presets walks through what each one does to a page.

Drop the PDF into Smol, choose the Small preset, run it, and check the size of the _compressed copy. If it is still over 5 MB, run the original again with Tiny. By default the original is left untouched.

1. 1

   Drag the PDF, or the whole folder, into Smol

   Mixed batches work, so a PDF, a few screenshots and a clip can go in together.

2. 2

   Pick Compress and a preset

   Small suits most text-and-image documents; Medium keeps more detail for scans. Tiny is the smallest and the roughest.

3. 3

   Run it and read the per-file sizes

   Smol shows the result for each file. Find the largest output; if it is under your cap, they all are.

4. 4

   Open the copy and read one page

   Zoom to the smallest text. If it is not legible, go up one preset and rerun from the original.

5. 5

   Upload the <name>_compressed copy

   Drag it into the Notion page or attach it in Confluence. Smol does not OCR, edit, sign, merge or split PDFs, so do those first.

Scanned documents are the case with the most to lose. Our guide to compressing a scanned PDF without killing OCR shows how a low preset can wreck text recognition on a scan, and how a separate OCR tool run first avoids it. For the general case, your PDF is too big to upload covers the same problem on other sites.

Notion shows that message when a file passes your plan’s per-file cap, which is 5 MB on Free. A phone photo, a 20-page PDF and a ten-second screen recording each exceed it easily.

• Photos. A phone frame is large in pixels. Resize to 2000 px or less and compress to JPG; for HEIC, use Compress with JPG output so your quality setting applies. See why iPhone photos are HEIC.
• Screenshots. Retina PNGs carry a lot of pixels. Lower the maximum dimension first; on our 24-photo test set, PNG compression at default settings made the files 69.2% smaller (see the benchmark; small photographs, so screenshots will differ).
• Recordings. Video is the hardest to fit under 5 MB. Linking a recording stored elsewhere sidesteps the cap.

If compressing is not enough, upload to storage you already use and paste the link, or upgrade the workspace. Smol does not change either choice; it makes the first one rarely necessary.

Confluence’s default attachment maximum is 100 MB, and a site admin can change it. Atlassian’s Cloud page for the setting states no upper bound.

Two details matter to anyone who works with large files. First, Data Center does not extract text from or index files over 100 MB. Second, extraction has its own caps by type: 8 MB for PDFs, 16 MB for Word, 1 MB for Excel and PowerPoint, applied to the uncompressed size, per Atlassian’s Data Center 8.8 page. A PDF over 8 MB can upload fine and still be absent from search, so shrinking it helps beyond the upload.

One more: an Atlassian issue, CONFCLOUD-85173, reports that REST API uploads over 100 MB fail with an HTTP 502 even when the site limit is higher, with the web UI as the workaround. A fix was waiting for release when we read it. Scripts that attach files may need the compressed copy.

For a recording or a long walkthrough, our guide to compressing a Mac screen recording covers the settings, and the screen recording page covers the support-team case.

Start with the free built-in routes. Here is how each fares against a 5 MB cap.

For a wider survey of Mac tools, see every way to compress images on Mac and the best PDF compressor for Mac.

Smol is a good fit for shrinking files before upload. It is the wrong one in these cases.

• You are on Windows, Linux or iOS. Smol runs on macOS only (13 or later on Apple Silicon, 14 or later on Intel).
• The file must stay pixel-identical. Smol has no lossless mode for images; it always re-encodes. A CAD export or archival scan should be linked, not shrunk.
• You need to edit the PDF. Smol does not OCR, redact, sign, merge or split. It also converts only the first page of a PDF to an image.
• You need an exact byte target for video. There is no size control for video; you adjust quality or resolution and check.
• The cap is the problem, not the file. If you routinely attach large files, ask your Confluence admin to raise the attachment maximum, or upgrade Notion.

Wikis collect files from everyone. Team is $49 once for three Macs, and Enterprise is $20 per seat once for 5 to 500 seats, both managed from a dashboard. Presets live on each Mac, so write your agreed settings (for example, Small for PDFs, maximum 1600 px for screenshots) on the wiki page itself and recreate them per seat. See pricing.