How to get a PDF under an upload limit (100 KB–2 MB)

Why the limit exists and why your file is too big

Government, university and recruitment portals set small limits (often 100 KB or 200 KB per document) because they store millions of uploads and many were built when storage was expensive. Your PDF is usually over the limit for one of three reasons: it contains photos or colour scans at full resolution, it has more pages than the form needs, or the program that created it stored the data inefficiently.

Knowing which applies tells you what to do. Inefficient storage can be fixed without any loss. Photos and scans can only be made much smaller by lowering their resolution or quality. Extra pages are best simply removed.

Step 1: send only what the form asks for

If the portal asks for "degree certificate", upload the certificate page, not the whole 12-page transcript bundle. Removing pages is the only reduction that costs nothing in quality. Use Remove Pages to drop what you do not need, or Extract Pages to keep just the pages you do.

Step 2: try lossless compression

Lossless compression rewrites the PDF's internal data more efficiently. Nothing you can see changes: text stays sharp and selectable. Documents exported from word processors and some scanners often shrink noticeably this way; PDFs that are mostly photos shrink little. Always try this first, because if it is enough you are done with no downside.

Step 3: when lossless is not enough

To go further, the pages have to be turned into compressed images at lower resolution. This is what makes a 3 MB scan fit into 100 KB, but it has two costs: text is no longer selectable or searchable, and small print becomes softer. A good compressor increases the strength step by step and stops as soon as the file fits, so you lose no more quality than necessary.

Always open the result and zoom to 100% before uploading. Check that ID numbers, dates, signatures and stamps are readable. An unreadable document is often rejected later, which is worse than a failed upload now.

Rules of thumb for each limit

These are typical figures for A4 pages; your results depend on the content.

• 100 KB: one or two text pages, or one scanned page in greyscale at about 150 dpi.
• 200 KB: a few text pages, or one to two scanned pages that stay clearly readable.
• 500 KB: most multi-page text documents, or three to six scanned pages.
• 1–2 MB: long reports and scanned bundles, usually with little visible loss.

Scanning with the limit in mind

If you still have the paper original, rescanning is often the best fix. Choose greyscale instead of colour unless colour matters (a stamp or a photo), use 150–200 dpi instead of 300–600, and crop off the dark border around the page. A phone scanning app set to "document" mode does this automatically and produces far smaller files than a normal photo.