A portal only accepts a PDF up to 2 MB and my five photos are bigger; how do I get under the limit?

Why the PDF came out too big

JPEG files go into the PDF byte for byte, with no re-encoding. That keeps full quality, but it also means five phone photos of about 3 MB each give you a PDF close to 15 MB. There is no compression switch in Images to PDF, and changing the page size or margin will not shrink the file, because those settings move the picture around the page without changing its bytes.

Work out each photo's share of the limit

Start from the number the portal itself states. A 2 MB limit is about 2048 KB, though some portals count it as 2000 KB, so plan for the smaller figure. Divided across five photos that is roughly 400 KB each. Leave a little room for the PDF structure itself and aim for about 350 KB per photo.

If the photos are not equally important, split the budget sensibly: an ID page or certificate with small print deserves a bigger share, while a plain passport style portrait can live with less.

Steps

1. If a photo is huge, such as 4000 px wide, reduce its dimensions first with the Image resizer. A document photo 1600 to 2000 px wide stays readable on an A4 page.
2. Compress the photos with the Image compressor as JPEG, starting around quality 75, and watch each file approach its share.
3. Open the converter and add the compressed photos. Each row shows the file size, so you can add them up before building.
4. Press Create PDF and read the result line, which states the page count and the file size.
5. If the total is slightly over, compress the largest photo alone once more and build again.

Common mistakes with size limits

• Using PNG for a photographed document: PNG keeps every pixel losslessly, so for a camera shot it is usually far larger than JPEG. Convert to JPEG while compressing.
• WebP files: the tool converts them in the browser to JPEG at quality 92, or to PNG if they have transparency, and the size can grow. Compress them to JPEG yourself so you control the result.
• A phone photo carrying a rotation tag: it is rotated and rewritten as JPEG at quality 92, so its size may differ a little from what you expect. Trust the result line over your arithmetic.
• Going by a number you heard elsewhere: the limit that counts is the one printed on the portal's upload page.

Will compression hurt readability?

At quality 70 to 80 the text in a document photo usually stays clear. Open the finished PDF and zoom into the smallest line before uploading. If letters look smudged, raise the quality of that one photo and lower a less important one; the portal only cares about the total.