Why 1 MB comes up so often
1 MB is one of the most common caps you'll meet on upload forms: insurance claims, rental applications, supplier registrations, tax and benefits paperwork. Compressing a PDF to 1 MB lets you send complete, multi-page documents to portals that require under 1 MB, instead of cutting them into pieces.
Compared with smaller targets, 1 MB leaves plenty of room. A document of many scanned pages can often fit while each page stays clear, and a single-page scan usually needs only a light touch.
Long scanned documents
Scanned documents are heavy because every page is a photo. A lease, a medical history or a set of bank statements scanned at high resolution can easily go well past the limit. Since our engine recompresses exactly those photos, scanned PDFs are where it tends to work best.
If you have the paper at hand, how you scan makes a difference. A scan in grayscale or with a document filter weighs less than a full-color one, and cropping the edges removes wasted space. “Scan to PDF” does both from your phone's camera. Want the text to be searchable too? Run “OCR PDF” on the result; it adds an invisible text layer without changing how the pages look.
Keeping print quality
Sometimes the person receiving your file will print it, or needs to read small print, like the clauses of a contract or the figures in a report. At a 1 MB target, ConvertirDocs lowers photo quality only until the file fits and then stops, so you keep as much detail as the limit allows.
If you don't need to hit an exact size and just want a lighter file for printing, the main “Compress PDF” page has a Low level that keeps photos up to 2400 pixels at 85% quality. And whatever the setting, typed text and vector graphics are never recompressed, so they print just as crisply as before.
When 1 MB isn't reachable
Very long documents, or PDFs whose weight comes from embedded fonts or from image types we leave intact (transparent, 1-bit, indexed, CMYK, JPX or JBIG2), may not fit. You'll get the smallest file achieved and a clear reason. Then you can split the document with “Split PDF” and send it in parts, if the portal allows several uploads. All of this runs in your browser; your PDF never leaves your device.