The hearing is close, your petition is ready, you scanned the exhibits — and the portal will not take the file. The error message does not help, because the system rarely says the problem is size. This piece explains how to find the real cause and how to get the file under the limit.
Diagnose the cause first
In practice an upload failure has three sources, and the fixes are completely different:
- The size limit was exceeded. This is the most common cause and it almost always comes from scanned exhibits.
- The format is not accepted. The portal expects specific extensions; uploading a phone photo directly is a common mistake.
- The file is corrupt or password protected. An encrypted PDF cannot be opened on the other side.
The fastest way to tell: try the same upload with a small, one-page test PDF. If that goes through, the problem is size or content; if it does not, the problem is on the portal's side and you have to wait.
What actually inflates the file: scanned exhibits
The petition itself is a few hundred kilobytes. What pushes a filing into tens of megabytes is nearly always the exhibits: pages scanned in colour at high resolution, or photos taken with a phone and turned into a PDF. A modern phone camera saves a single page as a 4–6 MB image; twenty pages easily pass 100 MB.
So the fix is not to trim the petition but to bring the exhibits down to a sensible size — which can be done without losing legibility.
Step by step: getting under the limit
- Compress the file: Feed the file to the compression tool and pick a level. Scanned, image-heavy documents gain the most; most files drop to about a third.
- Check the result by eye: Open the downloaded file and look at the page with the smallest type. If it reads comfortably, you are fine. If it blurred, step down one compression level.
- Still too big? Split it: If one file exceeds the limit, upload the petition and the exhibits as separate files. Splitting lets you break a document into page ranges.
- Name the parts meaningfully: Something like «exhibit-1-expert-report.pdf». File names are the cheapest way to make the reader's job easier.
Compress PDF — Shrink scanned exhibits without hurting legibility and get under the portal's limit.
Scan small in the first place
Scanning correctly beats compressing afterwards every time. Practical settings for official paperwork:
- Choose black and white or greyscale. If there is no coloured stamp or signature, you do not need colour — and colour triples the file.
- 300 DPI is enough. Higher does not improve legibility, it only inflates the file.
- If you are using a phone, scan the document rather than photographing it. A scanner finds the edges, corrects the perspective and produces a much smaller file.
Instead of turning a phone photo straight into a PDF, run it through the document scanner: edges are detected automatically, the page is flattened, and what comes out actually looks scanned — and is far smaller.
UDF files are a separate matter
UYAP's own document format, UDF, has its own and tighter size limit on the system side; in practice UDF files above 10 MB are reported as rejected. Worse, the system does not say so — it just shows a generic error.
If your UDF is large, the cause is almost always images pasted into the document. Taking the images out and uploading them as separate exhibits is the cleanest fix.
Limits differ by institution and filing type and change over time; for the exact figure, trust the note on the upload screen.
A final check before uploading
- Is the file password protected? An encrypted PDF cannot be opened on the other side; remove the lock.
- Are the pages in the right order and the right way up? A sideways exhibit makes the reader rotate the document.
- Is there personal data that does not belong in this filing? Take it out.
- Is the total size below the limit shown on screen?
These four checks take a minute and prevent most last-day upload crises.