Why websites reject your images

1. The file is too large

By far the most common. The form has a maximum in bytes — 2 MB and 5 MB are the usual figures — and your photograph is several times it. Modern phone cameras produce files that most upload forms were never sized for.

A subtlety worth knowing: forms disagree about what “2 MB” means. Some check against 2,097,152 bytes and some against 2,000,000. If you were confident your file was under the limit and it was rejected anyway, you may have landed in the gap. Aim at the decimal figure and you satisfy both.

2. The dimensions are wrong

Some forms want a minimum resolution, usually because the image will be displayed large or printed. Others want an exact size, which is common for anything that has to slot into a fixed layout — an app icon, a store banner, a profile header.

Minimum-dimension rules are the ones that most often conflict with a size limit. A form that wants at least 3000 pixels wide and under 500 KB is asking for something a detailed photograph may genuinely not be able to deliver, and no amount of clever software will resolve that. In that case the honest answer is to find out which rule actually matters.

3. The format is not accepted

The form takes JPG and PNG. You are giving it a HEIC from an iPhone, or a WebP saved from a website, or an AVIF, or a RAW file straight off a camera. Some forms say so clearly; many just fail.

HEIC is the dominant case now, because iPhones have defaulted to it for years while upload forms have not caught up. Converting to JPEG solves it.

4. The aspect ratio is wrong

Less common, but it happens with video thumbnails, banners and anything that gets placed into a fixed frame. The form wants 16:9 and your photograph is 4:3. Uploading it either fails outright or succeeds and then displays with the top and bottom cut off in a way you did not choose.

Cropping deliberately, before uploading, means you decide what gets removed instead of an algorithm deciding for you.

5. It is animated when it should not be

An animated GIF or WebP sent to something expecting a still image. Some systems reject it, some take the first frame, and some display something broken. Worth checking if you saved the image from a messaging app, where animated formats are common.

6. The colour profile is unusual

A rarer one, mostly affecting images that have been through professional print software. A JPEG saved in CMYK — the colour model used for printing — rather than RGB will be rejected by a lot of web software, or accepted and displayed with badly wrong colours. Re-saving through anything web-oriented converts it to RGB.

7. The file is corrupt, or is not what its name says

Files get truncated by interrupted downloads and transfers. And extensions lie constantly: an image saved from a website as photo.jpg may actually be a PNG or a WebP, because the name was set by the page rather than the file. Software that trusts the extension then fails in confusing ways.

This is why FileBelow identifies files by their contents rather than their name — a mislabelled file opens correctly and gets the right extension on the way out.

How to work out which one you have

Read the error message properly, if there is one — it is often more specific than it first appears. Then check, in this order: the file size, the extension, and the dimensions. Your operating system’s file properties panel shows all three in a few seconds, and one of them is almost always obviously wrong.

If the form gave you numbers, use them directly rather than guessing. That is the whole idea behind FileBelow: type in what the form demanded and get back something that meets it, with a line-by-line confirmation that each rule was satisfied.