Why Discord rejects large images
Discord free accounts are limited to 10 MB per file attachment. Nitro Basic raises this to 50 MB; Nitro to 500 MB. The limit applies to every file type — photos, documents, everything.
The 10 MB wall catches a lot of iPhone users by surprise. iPhone photos are taken in HEIC format, which is compact on device (3–5 MB per shot). But when you convert HEIC to JPEG — which Discord requires to display inline — an unoptimised conversion can produce files of 12–18 MB, well above the cap. Night-mode and panorama shots are especially prone to this because they contain more image data to begin with.
How to compress without losing visible quality
Discord re-encodes every image it receives for its inline preview — what your friends see in chat is always a Discord-compressed version, not your original file. That means the quality ceiling is set by Discord's encoder, not yours.
Pre-compressing to under 10 MB at JPEG quality 85 gives Discord's encoder a cleaner starting file. The resulting preview is noticeably sharper than what Discord produces when it crushes a 20 MB original. You are not sacrificing quality — you are just front-loading the compression so Discord has less work to do.
The converter above targets 10 MB by default. Drop your photo and it binary-searches the optimal JPEG quality to land just under the limit. EXIF metadata (date, GPS, camera) is preserved.
Batch-converting photos for Discord
Sharing a batch of photos from a trip or event? Drop the whole folder. Each file is fitted to 10 MB independently using a background Web Worker, so one large panorama doesn't block the rest. Download the JPGs individually or grab everything in one click as a ZIP — free either way.
Related: Compress for Discord · HEIC to JPG · WebP file won't open