When to compress a PDF
A scanned contract or an image-heavy proposal easily runs to tens of megabytes. Mail servers bounce the attachment, chat apps refuse it, and upload forms come back saying the file is too large.
This tool shrinks the images inside the PDF. Text stays text, so it remains searchable and selectable. The file travels to our conversion server, and both the original and the result are deleted the moment it finishes.
How to use it
- 1Upload the PDF. Up to 30MB.
- 2Pick a strength. Go strong for something only ever read on screen, gentle for anything you'll print.
- 3Press Compress and the conversion server takes over.
- 4Check how much came off, then download. Try another strength if you're not happy.
Common questions
- Does this one stay in my browser too?
- No. Unlike the other tools here, this one sends your file to our conversion server, because re-compressing the images inside a PDF is not something a browser can do. Both the original and the result are deleted as soon as it finishes; nothing is kept.
- How much smaller will it get?
- It depends entirely on the document. Photos and scans shrink a lot; a text-only file barely moves. A PDF that was already compressed once may not shrink at all.
- Will the text go blurry?
- The text isn't touched — only images are. But a scanned document is a photograph of a page, so at strong settings the writing softens along with everything else. Start gentle with those.
- The compressed file came out bigger.
- That can happen when a PDF was already well compressed and you compress it again. Keep the original in that case.
- What about files over 30MB?
- They're refused. If the document is long, split it with the PDF Split tool and compress the parts.