Compress an image to 5 MB
The 5 MB target is already set. Add your photo and FileBelow keeps as much of it as the limit allows.
JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC. Your file is processed on your device.
How do I compress an image to 5 MB?
Where the 5 MB limit comes from
Five megabytes tends to appear in places that were built or revised more recently than the 2 MB crowd. Google Business Profile caps photos at 5 MB. A good number of online marketplaces, booking systems, insurance claim portals and school applications settle on the same figure. It is generous enough that most photographs pass untouched, which is precisely why hitting it is confusing when it happens — the file that failed is usually only slightly over.
The images that do exceed 5 MB are usually one of three things: a photograph taken at a phone’s maximum resolution setting, a shot from a dedicated camera, or a screenshot or scan saved as PNG. That last case surprises people most, because the picture looks simple. PNG stores every pixel exactly, so a full-resolution scan of a document can be far larger than a detailed photograph of a landscape.
What usually goes wrong
At 5 MB the mistake is over-correction. Faced with a rejection, people tend to reach for whatever produces a definitively small file — exporting at 50% quality, or resizing to 1000 pixels wide — and end up throwing away far more than the limit ever required. If your photo is 6.2 MB and the ceiling is 5 MB, you need to lose about a fifth of the file. That is a trivial adjustment, invisible to the eye, and it should not cost you resolution at all.
This is the case FileBelow is most obviously better at, because it starts from the number rather than from a slider. It checks first whether the image already fits at the highest quality setting, and if a small reduction is enough it stops there rather than continuing to squeeze. You get a file just under 5 MB, not one at 900 KB.
If it still will not fit
A photograph that cannot reach 5 MB is nearly always a PNG, and the fix is to change format. PNG has no quality dial: it is lossless, so the only lever is the number of pixels. Converting a PNG photograph to JPEG typically cuts the file by 80 to 90 per cent with no visible difference, because JPEG is designed for exactly this kind of content. FileBelow will offer the switch and will have verified it works before offering it.
Keep the PNG if the image has transparency you need, or if it is a logo, diagram or screenshot with hard-edged text — those are the cases where JPEG genuinely looks worse, because its compression blurs sharp boundaries.