Google Classroom File Size Limit: Shrink Videos and Scanned PDFs on a Mac

Google’s Turn in an assignment page gives no per-file size cap. Teachers can attach documents, links, images and videos, and Drive files carry a View, Edit or Copy setting for students. The figures below come from Drive, Gmail and YouTube.

Your school’s Drive storage quota and any administrator rules sit on top of these, and they vary by school. Ask your tech coordinator. All figures were read on 11 October 2026 and can change.

Drive allows files up to 5 TB and 750 GB of uploads per user per day. A teacher posting worksheets will never reach either. The practical limit is time: a 2 GB lesson recording on school Wi-Fi can take long enough to fail halfway.

Size also decides who can use the file. A 300 MB scanned packet may upload fine and then stall on a student’s older Chromebook or a phone on mobile data. A Copy file is duplicated for each student, so a heavy file means a heavy copy for each of them. Shrinking before upload helps both ends. The same thinking applies to LMS uploads in general, covered in our guide for teachers, schools and universities.

Scan to PDF, then run it through a Smol PDF preset. Medium is the first one to try for worksheets, because small print and handwriting need pixels; Small suits email. Scanned PDFs are page images, so they tend to compress better than PDFs exported from a word processor.

Presets are pixel caps, not DPI targets, so how sharp a page looks depends on its page size. In our test of a 3-page, 300 PPI color scan, Medium left about 109 PPI and Small about 82 PPI; the method and results are in compressing a scanned PDF on Mac. In that test a separate tool, OCRmyPDF, added the text layer, and Smol Medium then took the file from 5,017,560 to 288,609 bytes (94.2%). Smol does not do OCR itself. Your own scanner’s output will differ, so open the result and read the smallest print on the page.

If the PDF is going out by email as well, read Get a PDF Under Gmail’s 25 MB Limit: base64 encoding adds roughly 37% (36.8% measured there), so a 25 MB cap means aiming near 18 MB.

Drop the video into Smol, choose MP4 with H.264, pick the Web quality label and reduce the resolution to 1280 pixels wide for a talking-head lesson. Then look at the output size. Smol sets quality and pixel size, not a byte count, so it cannot promise a target.

H.264 plays almost everywhere, including older school devices; H.265 gives smaller files at the same quality but not every school device plays it, so use it only where you know the playback device. The trade-off is in H.265 vs H.264, and the full method in how to compress a video on Mac.

What about student videos that are too large to turn in?

Student videos too large to turn in are often phone clips shot at 4K or in HEVC. If a student has a Mac, they can run the same settings. If not, collect the file on your Mac through Drive, compress a copy, and share that. Smol is Mac only, so a Chromebook student cannot run it.

1. 1

   Copy the files to a folder on your Mac

   Smol writes a copy with a _compressed suffix and, by default, leaves the original untouched.

2. 2

   Drag the folder into Smol

   PDFs, photos and videos can go in together as one batch.

3. 3

   Set the PDF preset, image quality and video settings

   Use Medium for PDFs, JPG at 75 for photos, MP4 H.264 Web for video, from the tables above.

4. 4

   Compress, then open the smallest and largest outputs

   Read the fine print on a PDF, scrub a video, and sort by size to catch files that stayed large.

5. 5

   Upload to Drive, then attach to the assignment

   Choose View for handouts, Copy for worksheets each student fills in, and Edit only for shared work.

Photos of a whiteboard or student work arrive at full camera size. The default in Smol resizes images to fit 2000 by 2000 pixels unless you change it, and metadata (including GPS) is stripped by default, which helps if you share photos taken in a classroom. In our benchmark of 24 small JPEG photos at default settings, Smol made them 69.3% smaller; the images are 768 × 512 film scans, so see the benchmark before expecting that on camera files.

Built-in and free options come first, and they work. Smol earns its place when you do this weekly for batches.

Our test of Preview’s Reduce File Size found it can enlarge text PDFs. If your school scans in bulk, the office scanning guide covers the copier side, and student submissions covers the other end.

• Your classroom runs on Chromebooks only. Smol is a macOS app and has no Windows, Linux, ChromeOS or iPad version.
• You need to edit, merge, split, sign or redact a PDF. Smol compresses and converts; it does not do those.
• You need searchable scans and have no OCR tool. Smol does not add a text layer.
• The file is already small, such as a one-page Google Doc export. Smol keeps the original if the result would be larger, so you gain little.
• You need pixel-identical images. Smol always re-encodes images and has no lossless mode.

A school buying for several staff: Solo is $29 for one Mac, Team is $49 for three Macs, and Enterprise is $20 a seat from 5 to 500 seats. Presets are saved per Mac, so write your settings on a shared sheet and recreate them on each machine.