Get a PDF Under 10 MB for a Visa or Job Portal
A visa or job portal caps uploads at 10 MB and you have a passport scan, photos and bank statements. Here is how to assemble the bundle and shrink it safely.
Before you compress anything, find out whether the portal wants one combined PDF or one file per field — every decision after that follows from the answer. Then shrink the scans inside each PDF rather than the PDF as an object, and when a single file is still over the cap, split it rather than crush it.
On a phone, Convertlix for Android (8.0 or later) does the assembling and the shrinking without any of it leaving the device: files are opened through Android's own file picker, the work runs locally, and the result lands in Downloads — no upload, so no server copy of your passport exists at all. Sign-in is required once, with no guest mode; after that the tools run offline, which airplane mode will confirm. Free-tier files are capped at 25 MB each with a server-set monthly conversion allowance shown in the app, and Premium raises the per-file ceiling to 2 GB.
The two ways this goes wrong
You are not imagining the difficulty: most portals state a size cap and say nothing about how to organise the files, so applicants fail in one of two opposite directions.
One giant bundle. Passport pages, a headshot, six months of statements and three letters get merged into a single 40 MB PDF, which is then compressed as a whole until the passport number is soft and the statements are grey mush. The photos were the problem; the letters took the damage.
Twenty tiny uploads. The opposite reflex splits everything to one file per page, then uploads nineteen attachments into a field that expected one document — or hits an attachment limit, and leaves a reviewer guessing which file is the marriage certificate.
You can fix the number of bytes. You cannot fix the portal's rules, so read the field's help text and any checklist it publishes before you start.
Order of operations
Assemble, measure, compress, split, check — in that order.
A merged PDF is roughly the sum of its parts, and those parts are wildly unequal. A phone photo of a passport page is commonly 2–5 MB; a 300 DPI colour scan of an A4 page is 1–3 MB; a bank statement you downloaded as a PDF is born-digital text at 50–150 KB a page, and compressing it returns nothing, because there are no images inside to re-encode. In a typical 10 MB failure two or three photographs are 80% of the file — find those and you are done. The DPI arithmetic behind that is in Compress a PDF Under 2 MB on Android (Free).
What to compress, and what to leave alone
| Document | Keep colour? | Safe compression | What you lose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passport, ID, visa pages | Yes | Colour at 200–300 DPI, JPEG quality around 80 | Fine detail in the security printing if you push further |
| Application photograph | Yes | Lower the JPEG quality, not the pixel dimensions | Smooth skin tones; blocking shows below about 70% |
| Scanned bank statements | No | Greyscale at 150 DPI | Coloured logos and highlighting |
| Downloaded statement PDFs | Leave alone | None — already text | Nothing, and you gain nothing either |
| Letters, transcripts, typed forms | No | Greyscale at 150 DPI, or 1-bit if plain black on white | All shading: a grey seal can vanish at 1-bit |
| Certificates with seals | Yes, if the seal is coloured | Greyscale at 200 DPI at most | The colour a reviewer may be verifying |
If one field imposes a much tighter cap than the bundle does, the per-page arithmetic gets strict fast; Compress a PDF Under 500 KB Without Blurry Text works that budget out.
How to get a document bundle under 10 MB
- Read the upload field before you touch a file. Note whether it wants one bundle or one document per field, the accepted file types, the per-file cap, any maximum attachment count, and any naming instruction.
- Assemble first, compress second. Turn loose photos into PDFs, then merge what belongs together. In Convertlix these are separate tools: Images to PDF turns photos into a single PDF (up to 20 images on the free tier), Merge PDF combines several PDFs into one (up to 5 PDFs per merge), Compress PDF shrinks PDFs by re-encoding images, and Split PDF breaks a PDF into separate files. Free-tier files are capped at 25 MB each, 2 GB on Premium.
- Check the total, then find where the bytes are. Sort by size and look at the biggest two or three files. They are almost always the photographs and colour scans, and almost always enough to get you under the cap on their own.
- Compress only the image-heavy files, one pass each. Leave born-digital letters and downloaded statements alone, and work from the originals rather than from already-compressed copies, because JPEG artefacts compound.
- Split rather than crush. If a file is still over after a sensible pass, break it at a natural boundary — statements by month, one certificate per file — and upload the parts if the portal allows more than one attachment. Only compress as far as the cap actually requires.
- Open every page, then name the files. Read the passport number, the
balances and the dates on screen. Then give each file a name a stranger can
sort:
passport-surname.pdf,bank-statements-jan-jun.pdf.
When to stop compressing
- A reviewer has to read a stamp. Seals, notary marks, security printing and handwritten signatures are what a case officer verifies. An application returned for an illegible document costs weeks, and being 4 MB under a 10 MB cap instead of 1 MB under it gains you nothing.
- The portal also demands PDF/A. Compression and PDF/A pull against each other, since PDF/A requires fully embedded fonts and forbids some compression schemes, so convert last and then re-measure. Convertlix does not produce PDF/A; LibreOffice's PDF export offers it free, and Adobe's own export is the reference implementation.
- The file is big because of page count. A 300-page bundle of born-digital text has nothing inside it to re-encode. That needs splitting, or a question to the portal about what it actually requires.
- You are guessing at the cap. Many visa and job portals cap uploads around 10 MB, and some set a much smaller limit per field, but the numbers move by country and by form — check the portal's own page rather than a forum post.
FAQ
Should I merge everything into one PDF?
Only if the portal asks for one document. Where it gives a separate field per document, upload one file per field with a clear name, because a reviewer working through a checklist has to find each item. Merge inside a category instead: all passport pages into one PDF, six statements into another — Merge PDFs Without Uploading Them Anywhere covers doing that without handing the files to a website.
Does the portal see the file name?
Usually yes: the name is sent with the upload, and many systems store it and show
it to whoever reviews the application. Some forms also reject names containing
spaces, accents or punctuation, so keep to letters, numbers and hyphens. Name
files for the person reading them, such as passport-bio-page-surname.pdf, and
follow any pattern the portal specifies.
Will compressing my passport scan get it rejected?
It can, if you compress hard enough that the machine-readable zone, the photo or the security printing become unclear. Keep an identity document in colour at 200–300 DPI and take the file size out of the photographs and statements instead. Check your work by opening the compressed page at 100% zoom and reading the passport number and expiry date off the screen; if you hesitate, go back to the original.
Does Convertlix upload my documents?
No, and for identity documents that matters, so here is the mechanism. Each file is opened through Android's own file picker, processed on the phone and written back to Downloads; nothing is transmitted, so there is no server-side copy to retain, expire or breach. Its network calls carry sign-in, licence, quota and payment data only, it asks for no storage permission, and its single runtime permission is the camera, used only for scanning pages. Turn on airplane mode and the tools still work.
What if I only have photos of the documents?
That is the common case, and it is fine. Photograph each page flat, in even light, with the whole document in frame, then combine the photos into one PDF per document rather than uploading loose JPEGs. Phone photos run 2–5 MB each, so a five-page document becomes a 15 MB PDF that needs one compression pass — Turn Photos Into One PDF for an Upload (Android) covers the assembly step.
Assemble the bundle first, find the two files holding most of the bytes, and compress only those.