How to Meet the PDF Size Limit on an Application Portal

Read the small print once, carefully. Three separate rules usually hide in it, and breaking any of them produces the same unhelpful error.

• Format. Almost always PDF. A JPEG of a document is rejected even when it is small enough.
• Size per file. Commonly 2 MB or 5 MB. Turkish e-Devlet forms often stop at 2 MB; bank and corporate portals sit between 2 and 5 MB.
• Total size or file count. Some portals cap the whole application, so ten small files can fail together while each one passes alone.
• One document per file. A diploma and a transcript in one PDF can be rejected as "incorrect document".

Size problems usually begin at the scanner. A text document scanned at 600 DPI in color is enormous and no more readable than the same page at 300 DPI in grayscale.

If you are using an iPhone, the Notes app or Continuity Camera produces a straightened, cropped scan that is far smaller than a raw photo. If you already have photos, turn them into a single PDF first — one PDF of five pages is easier to get under a limit than five separate files.

In File Acture, open Compress PDF, set Compress by to Target size and type the portal’s number — 2 MB, 5 MB, or a value in KB if the form is stricter. The app tries image resolutions from 300 down to 72 DPI, measures the real file size and stops at the highest quality that fits.

File Acture counts megabytes the way Finder does (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes). Portals that count 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes are therefore satisfied too, because our result is the smaller of the two readings.

Two switches matter for official documents. Convert images to grayscale shrinks a color scan of a black-and-white form dramatically. Remove document metadata clears the title and author fields that scanners leave behind, which is worth doing before anything leaves your hands.

If a 40-page appendix cannot reach 2 MB at a readable quality, stop compressing and change the shape of the problem.

• Split it. Split the PDF into parts and upload them into the extra slots most portals provide.
• Drop the decoration. Scan covers, blank pages and duplicated appendices add weight and nothing else.
• Rescan in grayscale at 300 DPI. It is faster than fighting a bad source file.
• Ask. Portals often accept a link or an emailed appendix when you write and ask. The size box is not always the last word.

The documents these portals ask for are exactly the ones you should not hand to an unknown server: passports, diplomas, payslips, bank statements, signature pages. An online compressor uploads the file, processes it on someone else’s machine and keeps it for a while.

File Acture does the work on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, the original file is never modified, and the free version covers 3 runs on each Mac with up to 5 files per run — enough for one application. See what Pro adds.