Storage Limits

Every site has its own storage allowance. The bar at the top of Media shows how much of yours is in use, and it reads your site's real allowance rather than a standard figure — so if yours has been raised, the bar already knows.

Photos cost less than you think

The size of a photo on your phone is not the size it takes up here. JPEG and PNG images are resized and re-compressed on the way in, and only the smaller version is kept — a large photo straight from a camera usually ends up a fraction of what you sent. If re-compressing would not actually make a file smaller, the original is kept instead, so nothing is ever made worse by the process.

This is why the per-photo upload limit is generous. For those two formats it is a limit on what you can hand over, not on what it will occupy.

GIFs and WebP files are the exception. They are stored exactly as they arrive, because both can be animated and re-encoding them risks breaking that. An animated GIF costs you its full size, so it is the one kind of image worth checking before you upload.

Video is what fills the bar

Video is not re-compressed the same way, so a few clips can take a serious share of your allowance where a few hundred photos would not. If you are running short, look at your videos first — it is almost always where the space went.

Larger videos are uploaded in parts automatically. There is no setting for this and nothing to choose: if a file is over the size that can be sent in one request, the dashboard breaks it up and sends the pieces. It is why a big video can succeed where you might have expected a rejection.

What happens when you upload

You can select up to 25 files at once. Anything beyond that is left out of the batch, and you are told rather than left guessing.

Files that are too large are picked out before uploading begins, not partway through. You get told which ones they are while everything else uploads normally, so one oversized file does not cost you the whole batch.

When you run low

Delete what you no longer need from the media grid and the space comes straight back.

Deleting is permanent, and it is worth a moment's care. If a picture is still used on a page of your site, removing it here removes it from there too — and the media grid does not tell you which files are in use, so nothing will stop you. When you are unsure about a file, open the page you think it belongs to and check before you clear it out.

If you need a larger allowance, ask your developer.