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JPG to PDF 1 MB

1 MB here is 1,024 KB, or 1,048,576 bytes. For a set of photos turned into a PDF it is a comfortable budget: five to ten document photos at a quality that still reads well. Build the PDF first, then compress to the target, and the tool reports what it reached.

JPG to PDF

How the budget splits across pages

This is the number people get wrong. 1 MB is not a per page allowance. Ten photos share it, so each gets about 100 KB, which is a good scan and a mediocre photograph. Twenty photos get 50 KB each, which is where a photographed page stops being pleasant to read.

Work out the division before you start. If ten pages at 100 KB each is not enough for what you are sending, the answer is fewer pages per file or a larger cap, not a different setting.

The two step run

The images to PDF tool assembles the photos, keeping the original pixels and letting you set page size and margin. Then the 1 MB compress target works the file down and checks the output before it ships.

The compress step tries the lossless methods first, but on a photo assembly they have almost nothing to work with. The file is images, so an image method is going to win, and the quality it picks is the whole story.

Where 1 MB goes wrong

Mail. A 1 MB PDF travels as roughly 1.3 MB once mail encodes it, which bounces off a 1 MB attachment limit. If the destination is an inbox rather than an upload form, aim lower. A 500 KB target clears it with room.

Going the other way, a 2 MB target doubles the per page budget and is the better choice when the form allows it and the photos carry small print.

Questions people ask

How many photos can go in a 1 MB PDF?
Five to ten at a readable quality, sharing about 100 KB per page. Twenty pages drops that to 50 KB each and the pages get soft. The budget is for the whole file, not for each image.
Why did my 1 MB PDF bounce off a 1 MB email limit?
Mail encodes attachments before sending and the encoded form is roughly a third larger. A 1 MB file arrives at the gateway as about 1.3 MB. Compress to 700 KB or less for a hard 1 MB mail cap.
Do the lossless methods help on a PDF made of photos?
Barely. Font subsetting has no fonts to work on and the structural rebuild has little dead weight to drop. The file is images, so an image method decides the outcome, and the tool says so in the result.
Should I resize the photos before converting them?
No. Let the compress step decide what resolution the page needs. Resizing first throws away information before anything has measured what the target actually requires.

Do it now

The tool runs in this browser. Your file never leaves the machine, and the result is checked before you download it.

JPG to PDF

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