Federal here, Odyssey eFileGA there
Georgia has two unrelated e-filing systems and they are easy to confuse. This page covers the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, which uses CM/ECF at 30 MB per document. Georgia's state superior and state courts use Odyssey eFileGA, which applies a 25 MB per-document limit inside a 35 MB envelope.
The difference is not just the number. CM/ECF measures each uploaded document on its own and publishes no separate envelope ceiling, while Odyssey enforces both a per-document limit and a lower limit on everything submitted in one transaction. A set of documents that satisfies the first can still fail the second.
So a filing prepared for one system is not automatically acceptable to the other, and 30 MB is the figure only for the federal district court.
Why a filing gets this large
Thirty megabytes is comfortable for text and tight for images. A brief exported straight from a word processor will not come close; a deposition exhibit scanned at 300 DPI in color will pass it inside about sixty pages.
Color depth is usually the first thing to look at. A page of black text on white paper scanned in 24-bit color stores three bytes per pixel to describe something essentially bitonal, and resolution above roughly 300 DPI records detail no screen will show.
Where the file already exists, compression does the same arithmetic after the fact — resampling the embedded images downward and re-encoding them, while leaving any real text objects in the document alone.
Checking the limit yourself
CM/ECF reports its own current ceiling. From the CM/ECF startup page, the Court Information link shows the Maximum PDF File Size the system will accept at that moment. That figure is authoritative for the system you are actually filing into, and it is worth a look whenever a filing is refused for size — districts raise these limits without much announcement, and a number you remember from last year may simply be out of date.
If the file is an exhibit
Lossy compression alters a file. Every byte of the output differs from the input, even where the page looks identical on screen, and that can matter if the document's authenticity is ever contested. ShrinkWrit shows the SHA-256 hash of the file you started with and the file it produced, so the change is documented rather than invisible.
The lossless mode strips metadata and repacks the file without touching a single pixel or sample. It saves less, and on a heavily scanned document it may not reach the limit at all — but when it does, the image data is bit-for-bit what it was. Your original is never modified either way; the output is always a new file.
Common questions
- What is the N.D. Georgia file size limit?
- CM/ECF reports 30 MB per document, with a separate 150 MB maximum that applies when documents are merged.
- Is this the same as eFileGA?
- No. eFileGA is Georgia's state court system and runs on Tyler Odyssey with a 25 MB document limit inside a 35 MB envelope. This page covers the federal district court.
- Does the 30 MB apply to each exhibit separately?
- It is published as a per-document limit, so each uploaded PDF is measured on its own.
- Does this tool upload my document anywhere?
- No. Compression runs inside your browser using WebAssembly. There is no server component to send a file to, which matters when a filing contains sealed or sensitive material.
The 30 MB figure on this page was last checked against the court’s own notice on Jul 2026. Limits change without much announcement — confirm it at the source before you file.