How to reduce a PDF for a visa application upload
Updated 19 September 2026
Visa systems are stricter than job portals: limits are lower, formats are fixed, and a rejected upload usually costs you an appointment slot rather than a retry. The limits below are the ones published by the portals themselves — check yours before you start, because they change.
The caps you are likely to meet
Those are the common ones, not a promise: the page you are uploading on states the real limit, and it wins.
| Where | Typical limit | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Schengen (most consulates) | 2 MB | PDF or JPG |
| UK visa (UKVI) | 6 MB per file | PDF, JPG, PNG |
| US DS-160 photo | 240 KB | JPG only, square |
| India online portals | 300 KB – 1 MB | PDF or JPG |
| Bangladesh government e-services | 300 KB – 2 MB | PDF or JPG |
Get under the limit
- Combine the pages of one document into a single PDF first — most portals want one file per document, not one per page.
- Compress that file, balanced setting.
- If it is still over, the document is a scan: rescan at 150 dpi greyscale rather than compressing twice.
Keep it readable
A consular officer has to read your bank statement. If compressing takes it to the point where digits are ambiguous, you have created a bigger problem than a large file: unreadable evidence is treated as missing evidence.
Check the compressed copy at 100% zoom before uploading. If you cannot read a figure, neither can they.
The photo is a separate problem
Visa photos have their own rules — exact millimetres, head height, background colour, and often a file-size cap of a few hundred kilobytes. Compressing a document does not help here; the photo has to be produced at the right size from the start.
Questions
- The portal rejects my file even though it is under the limit.
- Usually the format, not the size: some portals accept only JPG for photos and only PDF for documents, and a few reject PDFs that are password-protected or were signed digitally. Remove any password and try again.
- Can I merge every document into one PDF?
- Only if the portal asks for one file. Most want each document separately — passport, bank statement, invitation letter — and merging them can get the whole application returned.
- Is it safe to compress visa documents online?
- Compress PDF here runs inside your browser, so passports and bank statements never leave your device. That is worth checking wherever you do it, given what these documents contain.