Get a PDF under an upload limit

2026-10-10

Job portals, visa forms, university applications and government sites often cap attachments at 1 MB, 500 KB or even 200 KB. A phone scan of three pages can easily be 8 MB.

What actually makes the file big

In almost every case it is the images: scanned pages and photos stored at a much higher resolution than a screen or a printer needs. Text and lines take very little space. That is why compressing works so well on scans and barely at all on a PDF that is only text.

Step by step

1. Open the PDF in Compress PDF. It stays on your device; nothing is uploaded.
2. Keep Balanced (the recommended level) and press Compress PDF.
3. Compare the new size with the limit. The result shows the original size, the compressed size and how much smaller it is.
4. Still too big? Choose Smallest file and compress again. It uses a lower image resolution, so fine detail in photos can soften, but scanned text usually stays readable.

Sizes are shown the way your phone’s Files app and a Mac’s Finder count them (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes). Some portals count 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes; if you are right at the edge, aim a little lower.

Typical results

On a 300 DPI scan, Balanced made the file about 90% smaller in our tests: a 10-page 20 MB scan became about 1.6 MB. A PDF saved from a browser with photos shrank by roughly three quarters. A PDF that is only text may not shrink at all — Compress PDF then tells you it is already well compressed instead of giving you a file that is barely different.

If it still doesn’t fit

• Remove pages you don’t need with Delete PDF Pages, then compress again.
• Send it in parts if the form accepts several files: Split PDF cuts it by page ranges.
• Look at the result notes. If they say some images were left unchanged (for example print-color images or images with a special color profile), those parts can’t be made smaller safely, and the limit may simply be out of reach for this file.

Compress PDF can’t promise a specific size: it re-saves images at a sensible resolution and tells you honestly what it achieved.