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Several pages, one upload slot

A portal gives you one field and you have five pages. Merging them is easy; merging them and still landing under the size cap is where it goes wrong, because five phone photos in one PDF is routinely 25 MB against a 12 MB limit.

Why the obvious order fails

The instinct is: merge the photos, then squeeze the PDF until it fits. That fails because a raw phone photo of a page is mostly not the page — it is shadow gradient, desk texture and sensor grain. Compression spends its budget describing all of that, and to reach the target it has to take the bits from somewhere. It takes them from the text.

Flatten the lighting and straighten the page first and the photo becomes largely flat white with sharp black marks, which is the easiest thing in the world to compress. The same five pages then reach the same file size with the text untouched.

The order that works

1. Correct each page. Even out the lighting, remove glare, straighten the angle. This is what makes the rest possible.
2. Set the resolution to 300 DPI. Higher adds size without adding legibility.
3. Merge into one PDF, in the order a reviewer expects to read them.
4. Set the size target on the finished file, not on each page. Compression works better across the whole document.
5. Check the last page. Merges truncate silently more often than you would think.

Page order matters more than people think

A reviewer opening your file expects the cover letter first, then the evidence in the order your letter refers to it. A PDF where page 4 is the first thing they see does not fail a technical check, but it does make a person read your submission twice — and a request for evidence costs weeks.

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