My PDF Kept Getting Rejected — Here’s the Upload Routine That Finally Worked

Last monsoon I spent an evening fighting a loan portal. Every upload came back the same: file too large, try again. The documents were fine. The phone photos were the problem.

I’d photographed the PAN, Aadhaar, salary slips, and a signed form under yellow kitchen light. Separately they looked okay. Zipped into one PDF they ballooned past the 2 MB cap. Compressing the whole pack once made the ID numbers soft. Compressing nothing meant the portal won.

What was actually going wrong

Portals don’t care that your scan is “high quality.” They care about bytes. Phone cameras shoot for social media, not for bureaucracy. One glossy photo of a certificate can weigh more than a clean multi-page form.

I also had no order. Cover letter in the middle, KYC at the end, duplicate pages I’d forgotten about. Merging first without naming files made every retry feel random.

The routine I use now

Nothing fancy. Just stubborn and repeatable.

1. Keep a master folder of originals. Never overwrite those.
2. Rename copies: 01-cover.pdf, 02-id.pdf, 03-salary.pdf. Zero-padding keeps sort order honest.
3. Merge in that order with Merge PDF.
4. Check page count. If it’s higher than you expect, you dragged a duplicate.
5. If size is over the limit, run Compress PDF on a copy of the merged file.
6. Open the result at 100% zoom on an ID page and a text page. If names blur, undo and compress only the heavy photo pages (split → compress those → merge again).

That last step saved me. Crushing everything equally is how you get unreadable stamps.

Small habits that cut retries

Photograph documents flat, with daylight if you can. Crop before you merge. Don’t include extra “just in case” annexures the checklist never asked for—those pages add weight and risk.

When a portal asks for “first five pages,” verify those five are content, not a blank scan and a selfie of your desk.

A note on privacy

I don’t merge ID packs on shared café Wi‑Fi machines anymore. Once a packet exists, treat it like the originals. Our privacy policy explains how uploads are handled; you still decide what leaves your device.

If you’re stuck tonight: merge cleanly first, compress second, and judge quality with your eyes—not only the file-size number.

Merge PDF · Compress PDF · more on the PDF tools page.