Compress PDF
Scans and photo-heavy PDFs made smaller. Nothing uploaded, pages untouched.
What shrinks, what does not
- Scans and photo pages: each page is a picture, so they shrink a lot — often to a fraction.
- Text PDFs (from Word, a browser, an editor): already small; the result stays close to the original.
- Mixed documents: pictures shrink, the text around them stays sharp and selectable.
Compressed on this device. Nothing is uploaded or stored.
How to use
- Drop in the PDF, or pick it.
- Choose a quality. “Balanced” is enough for screens and everyday printing.
- Press compress, check the before/after size, save. The original stays as it was.
Examples
Email says the attachment is too large
A scanned contract comes out of the office scanner far bigger than it needs to be, because each page is a full-resolution photo. Balanced brings the pages down to about 140 dpi, which reads fine on any screen.
A portal with a per-file size limit
Job applications, insurers and universities often cap uploads at a few megabytes. Try Balanced first; if the card still shows more than the limit, run Smallest on the original.
PDFs from a phone scanner app
Phone scanners save each page as a large JPEG. The pages are text, so shrinking them to 1000–1600 px wide costs nothing you can see and saves a lot.
Why some PDFs barely shrink
A PDF made from Word or a web page is mostly text and vector drawings, which are already tiny. There are no big pictures to re-compress, so the result is close to the original.
FAQ
Is the file uploaded?
No. The PDF is read and rewritten inside the browser tab. There is no server, and the page keeps working with the network off.
What exactly gets smaller?
The images. Each photo or scan inside the file is decoded, resampled to the preset’s pixel ceiling and re-encoded as JPEG at the preset’s quality. Text, vector graphics, fonts, links, bookmarks and form fields are copied as they are.
What do the three presets mean?
Best quality: images up to 2400 px on the long edge, JPEG 85%. Balanced: 1600 px, 75%. Smallest: 1000 px, 60%. An image is only replaced when the new version is at least 10% smaller.
Will it lose quality?
Images are re-compressed, so yes, a little — mostly invisible on screen at Balanced. Fine text inside scans can get softer at Smallest. Text that is real text (selectable) is not touched at all.
I have a size limit to meet, say 5 MB.
Run Balanced and read the card. Still over? Run Smallest on the original file, not on the already-compressed one. If it is still too big, the file has little image data to give — split it into parts instead. PDF Split
Does text stay selectable and searchable?
Yes — real text (the kind you can drag over) is copied untouched. Note that in a scanned PDF the “text” is a picture; that picture is re-compressed, while any hidden OCR text layer on top of it is kept as it is.
It did not shrink. Why?
Either the file has no large images, or they are in a format this tool leaves alone: JPEG 2000, fax-style black-and-white (CCITT, JBIG2), CMYK, indexed colour. Those are kept unchanged rather than risked.
Password-protected PDFs?
Not yet. A protected file is reported and nothing is written. Remove the password in the app that made it first.
Is there a size limit?
No fixed limit. Every image is decoded in memory, so a phone may struggle with very large scans. On a computer a few hundred pages is fine.
I need to join or split files too.
Compress last: merge or split first, then shrink the result here. PDF Merge