The 2 MB wall
You took a nice photo, converted it to JPG, and the upload still fails: “File exceeds maximum size of 2 MB.” This happens a lot, because HEIC is roughly twice as efficient as JPG. A 2 MB HEIC turns into a JPG that’s too big for the very limit it would have passed as HEIC.
You’ll see 2 MB caps on:
- Content management systems and hosted blogs
- Forum and community software, for attachments and galleries
- Help desks and support tickets, for screenshots and photos
- Club, school and church websites run on shared hosting
Full resolution, most of the time
2 MB is a comfortable budget. We start at quality 90 and step down only as far as needed. For a typical 12 MP iPhone photo that usually means a high quality JPG at the original pixel size, so you can still crop or zoom later.
Very detailed scenes or 48 MP photos may need a gentle downscale. We only shrink dimensions after quality has gone as low as it sensibly can (about 55), so the photo you get is always the best one that fits.
Quality vs size at a glance
| Starting photo | Likely result under 2 MB |
|---|---|
| 12 MP, simple scene | Full size, high quality |
| 12 MP, very detailed | Full size, slightly lower quality |
| 48 MP | Scaled down to fit |
| Screenshot or graphic | Full size, near-original quality |
Blogging with iPhone photos
If you run a WordPress site, Convert HEIC for WordPress has settings tuned for blogs. For pages where speed matters more than full resolution, a 500 KB version or a resize to 1920 px loads much faster for readers.
Colours that match your phone
iPhone photos are captured in Display P3, a wider colour range than older screens use. We embed that colour profile in the JPG so your photo looks the same on your site as it did on your phone. If a forum strips the profile and colours look flat, switch Colour to “sRGB” and compress again.
Offline-ready
After one visit the compressor is cached, so you can prep a batch of photos on a train with no signal and upload them later. Nothing ever needed to leave your device in the first place.