Compress a PDF
Make a PDF smaller without sending it to anyone. This tool re-encodes the photos and scans inside your PDF at a sensible resolution, strips hidden metadata, and rebuilds the file with compact internal structures — the three things that actually shrink real-world PDFs.
A promise you’ll rarely see on compressor sites: if your PDF can’t meaningfully shrink, we’ll say so and keep your original, instead of handing you a “compressed” file that’s 2% smaller or — the classic trick — one that’s been rasterized into a blurry image. Text in your PDF stays sharp, selectable text. Always.
Drop your PDF here
Or click to browse. Processed on your device, never uploaded.
How it works
- Drop your PDF above.
- Pick a level: Light (~300 DPI, prints cleanly), Balanced (~200 DPI, ideal for email), or Strong (~144 DPI, smallest readable scans).
- Click “Compress PDF” and watch the before → after size.
- Download — or keep the original if we couldn’t improve on it meaningfully.
What makes PDFs huge — and what this tool does about it
In almost every oversized PDF, the weight is images: a phone photo inserted into a report is often 4,000 pixels wide and 3–5 MB on its own; a “300 DPI color scan” of a letter page is even bigger. Text and vector graphics are typically a rounding error. So real compression means re-encoding images at the resolution the document actually needs — that’s what the three levels control.
The tool re-encodes JPEG images (the format inside virtually all scans and photos). Rarer image types — JPEG 2000, TIFF-style raw bitmaps with unusual color spaces — are left untouched rather than risk corrupting them. Metadata (author names, editing history, embedded thumbnails) is stripped by default; there’s a checkbox to keep it.
Why some PDFs won’t shrink
A text-only PDF exported from Word is already compact — there’s simply nothing heavy to remove, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Likewise a PDF that has already been compressed aggressively: re-compressing an already-low-quality JPEG mostly adds artifacts, not savings. Our guide to PDF file size explains how to check what’s actually inside yours.
Good to know
- For email, Balanced is usually right: Gmail caps outgoing attachments at 25 MB and Outlook.com at 20 MB (checked July 2026), and Balanced gets typical scans far under both.
- Compressing a scanned contract you’ll need to print? Use Light — 300 DPI survives printing; 144 DPI visibly doesn’t.
Frequently asked questions
Will compression make my text blurry?
No. Real text (the kind you can select) is never touched — it’s vector data and already tiny. Only embedded photos and scans are re-encoded. In a scanned document the “text” is itself an image, so Strong compression will soften it slightly — that’s the trade-off the level picker makes explicit.
Can I compress to an exact size, like under 1 MB?
Not exactly — final size depends on what’s in the document, and promising an exact number would mean silently destroying quality to hit it. Run Balanced first, check the result, and step up to Strong if you need more. If a portal demands a hard cap the images can’t meet, the honest fix is splitting the document.
Is it safe for confidential documents?
That’s the point of doing it in your browser: the file never leaves your device. There’s no upload, no queue, no retention policy to trust — verify it yourself with DevTools open (Network tab) while compressing.
Why did my PDF only shrink a few percent?
Most likely it’s text-heavy (already compact) or its images were already compressed hard. The result note tells you whether images were re-encoded or only structural cleanup applied. Some producer bloat — repeatedly embedded fonts, for instance — can’t be safely undone after the fact, so not every oversized file is fixable.