Images, Videos, and Files

Welcome to our lesson on Images, Videos, and Files. Alongside text blocks, databases and other block types, Notion can also store and display various file formats. In this brief lesson, we’ll cover the technical limitations as well as best practices for storing files within Notion.

Upload limits

Notion is very generous with its upload limits — on the Free plan, your max file size can be no more than 5MB (one file), whereas on all paid plans there is a soft limit of 5GB per file. This means that each individual file you upload has to fit within this limit, but there is no total storage limit per account or workspace. As long as your individual files all comply with the upload limits, you can store as many files in Notion as you’d like – and there won’t be another limit you might hit.

This is very generous on Notion’s end, and thus might encourage some folks to treat Notion as an affordable file storage solution. I don’t recommend doing this, but I’ll explain why a bit later in this lesson.

File types

Notion can upload and store a lot of different file types. As per their current documentation, here’s a full list of all of the currently supported formats:

HEIC
ICO
JPEG
JPG
PNG
TIF
TIFF
GIF
SVG
PDF
WEBP
MP3
MP4 (Note that MP4 files can sometimes have video compression or other components that aren’t supported in Notion. You can try converting these files into a different file type if you’re having issues.)
WAV
OGG

As you can see, these are mostly image-&-video formats, since that’s what Notion’s file attachments are mostly meant to do — serve as attachments to our docs.

Uploading and managing files

Each file uploaded to Notion is its own block, and you can upload a file in a few different ways.

The most straightforward way is to just use the /file command on any Notion page – this will open up a dialog menu that will let you upload your file either by selecting a file from your computer or embedding a file from a public link. We’ll talk about embedding in just a bit.

[File upload dialog]

We can also use dedicated commands for audio, video, and images. If you use these commands (/image, /video, /audio) your file will be not only uploaded to Notion, but also directly embedded (displayed) within your page. If you try uploading an image with /file, it will show as an attachment, but you’ll need to actually click it for it to open. If you use the direct command, /image, that image will be now displayed directly on your page, next to any other blocks.

Managing images

While movies and audio will be uploaded as-is, with no option to cut or edit these once uploaded, we can crop and resize images after uploading them into Notion. Once an image is uploaded, you can:

Use the vertical black scrollbars on either side of the image to scale your image up or down within the page
While hovering over the image, you’ll see a few options appear in the top right
First option will let you comment directly on the file itself
Second option aligns your image in the center, left, or right of the page
The “caption” button lets you add a small caption to your image
The crop button opens up a cropping menu that lets you crop the image freeform or according to a bunch of pre-select ratios
Magnifying glass lets you expand the image (preview full screen) This can be also done by clicking on the image twice or hitting the spacebar while your cursor is focused on the image block.
Download lets you download the image (duh)
The three dots open the usual block menu, which has a few additional options:
1. Alt text lets you add alternative text to the image – this is great for anyone with impaired sight and using a screen reader
2. Add link – this lets you add a custom link that will be opened whenever someone clicks on the image

[GIF with image options]

Embedding files from the web

For each file type, you can embed a file from a publicly available link instead of uploading directly to Notion. If your files are, for example, public images already stored on the web, you can link them directly instead. In our experience, this isn’t a common use case, but it’s an option if you’d like to use it. Keep in mind that the file has to be available at a publicly accessible URL, so double check your permissions before doing so.

In the /image upload dialog, you can also choose Unsplash or Giphy, and directly embed images from either service into your Notion page. Unsplash is a popular repository of royalty-free images, while Giphy is a well-known GIF bank.

Best practices

In our experience, there are two important best practices when working with files in Notion:

Smaller file sizes work best
Notion is not meant to be used as a file storage solution

First up, something quite obvious — the bigger the file size, the slower it will be to upload, open, and load the file every time you open a page that has it open. Right now, Notion is a web app, which means that most files and attachments get downloaded every time you open a page they’re embedded on.

Thus, we definitely don’t recommend storing very large, uncompressed files within Notion. Your pages will simply be slow. Downloading and uploading will be slow. It’s possible, yes, but not really recommended.

We also don’t recommend treating Notion as a file storage solution, since it doesn’t handle all file types, and there is no central way to manage all your files — file storage is definitely not Notion’s focus. Because of that, we recommend treating files in Notion as a nice way to augment your docs, but not as a replacement for a dedicated file storage solution, such as Google Drive or iCloud.