Compress PDF

Bring a PDF under an email attachment or upload limit. Pick the safe route or the aggressive one.

No upload

Drop a PDF here

Pick one file and its page count is read. The file is not sent anywhere.

How to shrink a PDF

  1. 1

    Choose a PDF

    The current size and page count are shown.

  2. 2

    Pick a method

    The default is "Shrink the photos". Set how far to go with resolution and quality. If you need more, switch to "Redraw pages as images".

  3. 3

    Check the result

    It tells you how much it saved. If the result would be larger, you get the original back instead.

The difference between the two methods

Shrink the photos

Almost all of a PDF's size is the photos inside it. Text weighs tens of kilobytes at most. So re-encoding just the photos at a lower resolution shrinks the file a great deal without touching a single letter.

Text, tables and lines stay exactly as they were, still selectable and searchable. Photos in formats that cannot be handled safely are left alone, and the result tells you how many were shrunk and how many were left.

Redraw pages as images

Every page is redrawn as an image at the resolution you set. Documents full of photos or scans often drop below half their size.

The cost is that text becomes part of the image, no longer selectable or searchable. Not for documents you have to file or archive; good for material that only needs to be looked at.

Lower resolution saves more but blurs the text. Around 120 DPI is a comfortable point for reading on screen.

Common questions

Why did almost nothing come off?+

If the photos inside are already small, or the document is mostly text, there is little to remove. Photos with transparency and black-and-white scan formats are left alone because re-encoding them makes things worse. In that case try "Redraw pages as images", or drop the pages you do not need.

The result came out bigger.+

Then you get the original back with a note saying so. We will not grow a file in the name of compressing it.

Can I undo the image method?+

No. Once text becomes an image, the original text is gone. Keep your original file.

Is it slow on a long document?+

The image method redraws every page, so yes. Progress is shown as a count, and a warning appears on phones where memory may run short.