Compress Images for Notion — Free, Fast & Private
Notion’s free plan limits uploads to 5 MB per file. The detail that catches people out is what happens on a paid plan: the per-file allowance rises dramatically for attachments, but images stay in the same modest range. Upgrading is not the fix for a photo that will not upload — compressing it is.
And the cap is not really the problem. A page with thirty uncompressed screenshots technically complies with every limit and is still unpleasant to open, particularly on mobile, because Notion loads images as you scroll.
The screenshot problem
Notion is where screenshots go. Documentation, bug reports, design references, meeting notes — and screenshots are exactly the file type that is most often stored badly.
A macOS screenshot is a PNG. On a retina display it is captured at 2× scale, so a “half screen” grab is around 2880 × 1800 actual pixels, frequently 3–8 MB. Notion renders it in a column roughly 700 px wide. You are storing and transferring four times the pixels that will ever be shown.
Keep screenshots as PNG if they contain small text — JPEG destroys the crispness of UI type — but cut the width to 1400 px. That is still 2× the rendered column width, so it stays sharp on a retina screen, and it typically removes 70–80% of the bytes.
WebP is the right default for photographs
Notion runs in a browser and in Electron desktop apps, all of which decode WebP. For photographs, WebP at the Smart preset is typically 25–35% smaller than the equivalent JPEG at matching visual quality. On a page carrying dozens of images that compounds into a visibly faster load.
One caveat worth knowing before you commit: if you later export the page to PDF or Markdown, or hand the workspace to a tool that reads the files directly, JPEG is the safer interchange format. For images that only ever live inside Notion, WebP wins.
Covers and icons
A page cover is displayed as a wide, shallow band. There is no reason for it to be a 6 MB photograph: 1500 px wide is more than enough, and the vertical crop discards most of the image anyway. Page icons are rendered tiny — 280 px square is generous. Between covers and icons, a heavily-templated workspace can carry hundreds of images that are each ten times larger than they need to be.
Compression happens in your browser here, so internal documentation, unreleased product screenshots and client notes are never uploaded to a third party on their way into your private workspace.
Related: writing that ships as a newsletter · a deck built from the same screenshots
Documentation screenshots have their own conventions worth following — compressing screenshots for documentation covers when to keep PNG and how far to scale.