Your file is too big for the Google Form. Here is how to fix it once

The form will not take your file. You compress it, try again, and it is still refused. You compress it harder, upload it, and now the scan of your ID looks like it was photographed through a window.

Almost everyone does this, and the reason it goes wrong is that the number you are aiming at is invisible and the method you are using gets worse each time you repeat it.

The limit is not Google’s, it is the form owner’s

This is the part that causes most of the confusion. Google Forms does not apply a single upload size to every form. Whoever built the form chooses a maximum file size for the upload question, and the options available to them range from one megabyte up to very large. A university applications form and an internal expenses form can sit on the same platform and refuse completely different files.

So before compressing anything, read the upload question itself. The limit is usually written directly beneath it, along with how many files are accepted and which file types are allowed. If it is not written there, the safest working assumption is that the form is set to one of the smaller options, because form owners generally pick a size that keeps their own Drive storage under control.

Two other things reject uploads and are frequently mistaken for a size problem. You must be signed in to a Google account to upload to a form at all, because the file goes into the owner’s Drive. And the form may restrict which file types it accepts, so a perfectly small image can be refused by a form that only wants a PDF.

Why compressing three times makes it worse

Here is the mechanism, because once you see it you stop doing it.

Most of the weight in a scanned document is the images inside it, and those images are stored using lossy compression. Lossy means detail is discarded to save space, and the discarded detail is gone. When you compress the file again, the tool does not go back to the original. It takes the already degraded version and discards detail from that. Each pass compounds the damage of the pass before it while returning less and less space, because the easy savings were taken the first time.

That is why the third attempt looks so much worse than the first while barely being smaller. You are not compressing the document any more, you are compressing a copy of a copy.

There is a second failure that is quieter and worse. Some tools reach a small size by rendering every page into a flat picture. The file hits the number, and the text inside it stops being text. It cannot be selected, searched, copied, or read by a screen reader. If the form is for a job application and the recipient searches candidate documents for a keyword, yours will not appear.

Compress once, at a target

The fix is to stop guessing. Decide the number the form actually wants, then ask for that number directly rather than compressing repeatedly and re-checking the file size in your downloads folder.

Take the original document, not the version you already compressed twice. Enter the size the form is asking for. A good tool will work out how much to reduce the images to land at or under that figure and stop there, and will tell you the exact size of what it produced before you download it. One pass, from the source file, with the text left intact.

If the document is a scan and the number is very small, expect a trade. A ten page scanned contract cannot become five hundred kilobytes and stay crisp, because the information simply is not compressible that far. What you should not accept is a tool that hits the number by destroying the text and does not mention it.

When compression is the wrong answer

Some files are large because they contain a lot, not because they are stored badly.

A document that is mostly photographs is already near its floor. A fifty page scan is large because it is fifty photographs. In both cases splitting is the better answer where the form accepts more than one file, because two clean halves beat one ruined whole. Where the form takes only one file, ask the owner. Form owners can raise the limit in seconds, and many set a low one without realising what a scanner produces.

The quick version

Read the limit under the upload question. Sign in first, because that stops uploads for reasons that look like size problems. Go back to the original file rather than your third attempt. Compress once to the target. Check the reported size before uploading, and check that you can still select the text in the result.

Our compress PDF and compress image tools do this on your device, so the document you are uploading to someone else’s form is not also being uploaded to ours on the way.