Most application portals take photographs and signatures as JPEGs, but supporting documents — mark sheets, caste and income certificates, domicile proofs, experience letters, ID cards — are usually wanted as a single PDF, often with a hard size limit. If you scanned those documents with your phone, you have a pile of JPEGs, sometimes several megabytes each, and a portal asking for "one PDF, maximum 300 KB".
This page closes that gap. It turns any number of images into one PDF, one image per page, with a page size you choose, and it can squeeze the result under a size cap. It is written for exactly this job, which means the options are the ones forms care about — page size, order, rotation, margins and file size — and nothing else.
When do forms ask for images as a PDF?
Typical cases include:
- Educational certificates — 10th and 12th mark sheets, degree certificates and provisional certificates, often front and back in one file.
- Category and income proofs — caste, EWS, non-creamy-layer and domicile certificates.
- Identity and address proofs — Aadhaar, PAN, driving licence or voter ID, again frequently front and back together.
- Experience and NOC letters for recruitment, and fee receipts or bank documents for scholarships.
- Visa and passport supporting documents for services that accept uploads.
The size limit varies widely — anything from about 100 KB to a few megabytes is common — and some forms ask for one PDF per document while others want everything combined. The notification or the upload screen says which; read it before you start, because the answer decides how many images go into each PDF.
How do I make a PDF under 100 KB, 200 KB or 500 KB?
Type the limit in KB into "Max PDF size". The tool then builds the PDF repeatedly and keeps the best version that fits:
- It first tries full resolution (up to 2,000 pixels on the long side of each page) and searches for the highest JPEG quality that fits.
- If no quality level is small enough, it steps the resolution down — to 75 %, 55 %, 40 %, 30 % and finally 20 % of that — and searches the quality again at each step.
- It stops at the first combination that fits, so you get the sharpest PDF possible under the limit.
The limit is counted as 1 KB = 1,000 bytes, the stricter of the two definitions, so "500 KB" produces at most 500,000 bytes and passes whichever definition the portal uses. If the tool cannot reach the limit even at the lowest setting, it says so. The fixes are to split the document into several PDFs if the form allows it, drop blank or unnecessary pages (for example, the back of a certificate with nothing on it), or crop each scan tightly to the paper before adding it.
As a rough guide: a single A4 page of a printed certificate stays readable at well under 100 KB; a ten-page PDF under 200 KB means about 20 KB per page, which is only comfortable for plain printed text. Photographs of documents taken in poor light compress badly because noise costs bytes — better light is the best compressor.
Which page size and margin should I choose?
- A4 (210 × 297 mm) is the standard paper size in India and most of the world. Choose it unless you are told otherwise; officials who print your PDF will get correctly sized pages.
- Letter and Legal are US paper sizes. Use them only if a form specifically asks.
- Same as image makes each page exactly the shape of its image, with no white border. It is handy for ID cards and receipts where a mostly empty A4 page looks odd, but the pages may then print at unusual sizes.
With A4, Letter or Legal the image is scaled to fit inside the page without distortion and centred; the margin (0–40 mm) is the white space kept around it. Around 5–10 mm looks tidy and keeps edges from being cut off when printed. Orientation can be forced, but Auto is usually right: portrait pages for tall images, landscape for wide ones.
How do I order, rotate and remove pages?
Each added image appears in the page list with a thumbnail. The arrows move a page up or down, ⟳ rotates it by 90° clockwise (press it again to keep turning), and ✕ removes it. Nothing is final until you press "Make PDF", and after any change you simply make it again. For long documents it helps to name your scans in order — "01-marksheet-front.jpg", "02-marksheet-back.jpg" — before adding them, so they arrive already sorted.
How do I scan documents well with a phone?
You don't need a scanner. A phone camera produces perfectly acceptable document images if you control three things: light, angle and framing.
- Light: place the document near a window in daylight, or under a bright ceiling light, and make sure your own shadow and the phone's shadow don't fall across it. Avoid the flash — it creates a bright hotspot and washes out stamps and signatures.
- Angle: hold the phone parallel to the paper, directly above it. Tilted shots turn rectangles into trapezoids and make text at the far edge smaller and blurrier.
- Framing: fill the frame with the page, leaving a small border. A contrasting surface underneath (a dark table for white paper) makes it easy to crop later.
- Focus: tap on the text before taking the picture and hold still; take two shots and keep the sharper one.
Many phones have a document-scanning mode built in (in the camera app, Google Drive, Files or Notes) that straightens and crops automatically. Its output JPEGs work perfectly as input here. Keep the originals until your application is accepted — if the portal asks for a re-upload with a different size limit, you can simply make the PDF again from the same images with a new cap.
How do I keep text readable in a small PDF?
- Crop to the paper. Background table or floor around a document wastes pixels and bytes. Crop in your phone's gallery first, or use the main editor.
- Shoot straight on, in daylight. Even light and no shadows mean fewer bytes per page for the same sharpness.
- Don't upscale small images. The tool never enlarges images; if a scan is small, it stays small.
- Remove blank pages. Every page costs bytes, even an empty one.
- Check at 100 % zoom. After downloading, zoom into the smallest print on the page — roll numbers, dates, seals. If they are blurry, raise the limit or split the file.
Can I make a PDF from photos on my phone?
Yes. The page works in Chrome, Safari and Firefox on Android and iPhone. Choose the images from your gallery (iPhone HEIC photos are converted automatically), arrange them and download the PDF to your phone's files, ready to upload from there. Very large batches can be slow on older phones because every page is processed on the device; adding ten or fifteen pages at a time is comfortable.
Are my documents uploaded?
No. Many online converters upload your files to a server, build the PDF there and send it back — which means copies of your Aadhaar, certificates and bank letters sit on someone else's computer, at least for a while. Here, the images are read, resized, compressed and written into a PDF by code running in your browser. You can confirm it in your browser's developer tools (Network tab): no request carries your files. Once the page has loaded, it works even if you switch off the internet.
What this tool does not do
- It does not recognise text (no OCR). The PDF contains images of your pages, so the text is not searchable or copyable. Forms that accept scans don't need that.
- It does not edit existing PDFs. To make an existing PDF smaller, use the PDF compressor.
- It does not add passwords. Portals generally reject password-protected PDFs anyway.
For individual images rather than PDFs, see the image converter & DPI changer or compress an image to a KB target. Photo and signature requirements for each exam are on all exam photo sizes.
Document formats and size limits are set by each portal and change between notifications. Verify with the official notification before you upload.