You’ve got five scanned certificates for one application — degree, mark sheet, category certificate, income proof, ID proof — and the portal wants every single one under 200KB. Not under 200KB combined. Each one.

So here’s the question: is there a way to compress a batch of PDFs to the same size limit in one go, instead of doing each file separately?

Straight answer: no, not on FatafatPDF, and probably not on most free browser-based tools either. Compress PDF takes one file at a time — there’s no multi-file drop zone, no queue, no “compress all” button. You upload a PDF, set a target, compress it, download it, and then do the next one.

That sounds slower than a “batch compress” feature would be, and it is, technically. But it’s faster than you’d expect once you see why.

Why there’s no batch mode

Target-size compression isn’t a fixed formula — it’s search. The tool renders each page of your PDF as an image, re-encodes it at a given JPEG quality, checks whether the resulting file fits your target, and if it doesn’t, drops the quality and tries again, sometimes shrinking page resolution too if quality alone won’t get there. That loop runs differently for every file: a clean, recently-scanned certificate might hit 200KB on the first or second try, while a dense, busy scan with a photo and a stamp and fine print might need several passes at lower quality to squeeze under the same number.

Running that search for five unrelated files at once, all competing for the same “target,” isn’t actually simpler than running it five times — it’s the same work, just bundled into one click that hides what’s happening to each file individually. And because everything happens in your browser via JavaScript rather than on a server, there’s no backend queue to parallelize across anyway. One file in, one file processed, one file out.

One thing worth knowing before you start: Compress PDF actually has two modes, not one, switched by a toggle at the top of the tool. Everything above describes Target mode — set a byte number, the tool searches for a quality level that lands under it. The other tab, Quality mode, skips the search entirely and just applies a fixed compression level (low, recommended, or extreme), whatever size that produces. Quality mode is for when you want a file smaller and don’t care about hitting an exact number. It’s not what you want for five certificates that all need to clear the same 200KB line — for that, stay on Target mode and set the number once, which is what the rest of this article assumes you’re doing.

The part that actually saves you time: the target doesn’t reset

Here’s the detail that matters for your five certificates. When you set the target to 200KB — either by tapping a preset or typing a custom number — that setting stays selected in the tool. Finish one file, click to compress another, and you land back on the same 200KB target you just used, not a blank slate asking you to re-enter it.

So the real workflow for five documents going to the same portal looks like this:

  1. Drop in certificate 1. Confirm the target is set to 200KB (tap the 200KB preset, or type 200 into the custom field).
  2. Compress. Check the result screen — it tells you the output size and whether it actually landed at or under 200KB, not just that it finished.
  3. Download, then start the next file. The target is still 200KB. Repeat for certificates 2 through 5.

Five files, five rounds of upload-compress-download, but only one round of actually deciding on a number. That’s the part that used to cost time — second-guessing “was it 200 or 250 for this portal” — and it’s gone after the first file.

Compress the worst file first, not whichever one’s on top

Before you settle into the upload-compress-download rhythm, pick your hardest file out of the five and run it first, out of order if you have to. The hardest file is the one with a photo on it, a colored seal or letterhead, a background watermark, or the highest scan resolution of the bunch — anything that isn’t just black text on white.

Here’s why the order matters: if that file clears 200KB, the other four almost certainly will too, since they’re less visually dense. If it doesn’t clear 200KB, you find out on file one instead of file four, with time left to rescan it, crop it, or convert it to grayscale before you’re rushing to finish the batch. Running the easiest file first only tells you the tool works — it doesn’t tell you whether your specific target is achievable across the whole set, and that’s the thing you actually need to know early.

What to do when one file won’t cooperate

Not every scan compresses the same way. A certificate that’s mostly clean white background with black text will hit a tight target easily. One with a photo, a colored seal, or a background watermark pattern has more visual information to throw away, and might still come in over 200KB even at the lowest quality setting.

When that happens, the tool says so on the result screen rather than rounding up and handing you a file that still fails the portal’s check. If a specific document keeps missing the target, a few things usually help: rescan it in black and white or grayscale instead of color if the original scanner defaulted to color, rescan at a lower DPI instead of relying on compression to undo an overly detailed scan, or crop out blank margins before compressing — white space you can’t see still costs bytes as image data.

If one file is password-protected, Compress PDF won’t open it

If some of your five documents came from DigiLocker or a state government portal rather than your own scanner, there’s a decent chance one of them is a password-protected PDF — the file itself is locked, separate from whatever login the portal wants. Compress PDF has no way to ask you for that password mid-process; it just fails to open the file and shows the same generic “couldn’t compress this file — make sure it’s a valid PDF” message it gives for any file it can’t read, which doesn’t tell you the real problem is a lock, not a corrupt file.

If a file won’t compress and you know it came from somewhere that password-protects downloads, that’s the first thing to check. Run it through Unlock PDF first — you’ll need to know the password (DigiLocker-issued PDFs commonly use a fixed pattern like your name plus date of birth, check the download page for the specific format), enter it once, and download the unlocked copy. Bring that file back to Compress PDF and carry on with the same 200KB target as the rest of your batch.

Keeping track of which file is which

One real risk with five near-identical PDFs going through the same tool back to back: downloading “certificate-compressed.pdf” five times and losing track of which is which. The tool keeps the original filename and appends “-compressed” to it, so if your source files are already named sensibly — degree-certificate.pdf, income-proof.pdf, and so on — the output stays identifiable. Worth renaming your source files before you start if they’re currently called scan001.pdf through scan005.pdf off your phone.

The honest summary

There’s no batch upload, no drag-five-files-in feature, and this article isn’t pretending otherwise. What Compress PDF does give you is a target that persists across files, an honest pass/fail on every single result, and a per-file process that takes maybe fifteen seconds once you’re not second-guessing the number. For five certificates, that’s five short rounds — not one click, but not five separate decisions either.