What File Types and Sizes Does ChatGPT Support for Attachments?

ChatGPT can handle a wide range of file types as attachments, but there are some limits to be aware of.

Supported file formats include common document types like PDF, DOC/DOCX (Word documents), TXT, and spreadsheets like CSV or XLSX. You can also upload images (PNG, JPG) and even programming code files or ZIP archives. Essentially, if it’s a text-based file or an image, ChatGPT will usually accept it. When it comes to size, OpenAI has set clear limits: each file can be up to 512 MB in size, which is quite large (far larger than most PDFs or images). However, very large text files might hit a different limit, specifically about 2 million tokens of text per file (that’s roughly equivalent to a book-length document, so you’re unlikely to hit this in normal use). 

For spreadsheets (CSV/XLS), there’s an effective size cap around 50 MB, since extremely large spreadsheets could be hard for the AI to process.

Images have a smaller limit—about 20 MB per image. Also, note that you can attach multiple files to a single project (the interface currently allows up to 20 files per project chat in many cases). If you have many files, consider zipping them into one archive under the size limit.

Best practices

Ensure your file is in a compatible format (for example, PDFs are great because ChatGPT will extract the text; images should be clear if you want it to read them). Avoid extremely long documents if possible – if you only need part of a document analyzed, it may help to split it or point ChatGPT to the relevant section after upload.

Privacy tip

Only upload files you’re comfortable sharing with the AI – OpenAI does store these for the chat duration, so avoid highly sensitive personal data. In summary, ChatGPT supports most text and image files with generous size limits (512 MB per file), so you can confidently upload reports, presentations, data, or images for analysis. Just keep within those limits and you’re good to go.

Keep your workflow flowing by attaching your next report or dataset to ChatGPT and letting the AI do the heavy lifting. Just remember the size limits, and you’re all set to explore insights hidden in your files!