Government upload limits are a mess, so I documented all 18 of them
A few months ago someone told me their permanent residence application had been returned because a scanned document was too big. They had compressed it to 4 MB, which is what the article they read said. The portal they were using allows 5 MB — and the file they actually needed to shrink was a different one. That sent me down a hole. I went looking for a table of official upload limits and could…
A few months ago, someone faced issues with their permanent residence application because a scanned document was too large. They compressed it to 4 MB, but the portal they were using allowed for 5 MB. This led the reporter to search for a table of official upload limits, only to find contradictory information across various blog posts with no official sources or dates. The reporter then created a table with 18 upload limits, each linked to their corresponding page and dated.
One key finding was that a single service like Canada's immigration department often has multiple limits. For example, the secure account, permanent residence, and citizenship streams cap each file at 4 MB, while the IRCC Portal allows 5 MB. The same department and applicant can have different ceilings depending on the portal they use. Similarly, France's DossierFacile allows 10 MB per file but 50 MB per document, based on whether the user uploads pages one by one or as a single block.
The table includes limits from various organizations, such as India's ICAI exam photo limit of 50 KB, France's state services upload limit of 1 MB, Canada's IRCC secure account limit of 4 MB, South Africa's SARS eFiling limit of 5 MB, the UK's Legal Aid Agency CCMS limit of 8 MB, Microsoft 365/Exchange limit of 10 MB, DossierFacile's per-file limit of 10 MB, Gmail's limit of 25 MB, Brazil's SEI limit of 50 MB, and Canada's CRA document submission limit of 150 MB.
The reporter emphasizes the importance of compression happening client-side, as uploading documents to third-party servers for compression is not ideal. Modern browsers can handle PDF compression, merging, splitting, rotation, metadata addition, OCR, and rendering within a webpage using tools like pdf-lib, PDF.js, Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, and canvas with toBlob and a quality parameter.
This approach eliminates the need to upload documents to unverified servers, addressing privacy concerns while still meeting the government portals' file size requirements.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
