Compress PDF · reduce file size
Use it to meet limits like “max 10 MB per upload”. Scanned and photo-heavy PDFs shrink the most.
Why are PDFs so big?
Most of a PDF's size comes from photos and scanned images. A 300 dpi color scan from a phone or office copier can be 1–3 MB per page. This tool redraws each page at a resolution that's plenty for screens and printing, compresses it as JPG, and puts the pages back into a PDF.
Choosing a level
- Strong (100 dpi) — fine for reading on screen and the smallest result. Great for email attachments and upload limits.
- Medium (150 dpi) — small print stays crisp and normal printing looks good.
- Light (200 dpi) — when print quality matters.
- Grayscale — documents that don't need color get even smaller.
Enter a target size and the tool first tries your chosen level; if the file is still too big it lowers resolution and quality step by step, up to three more times.
Good to know
Because pages become images, you can't copy or search text in the result, and links and form fields are removed. Text-based PDFs exported from Word are usually small already and could even get bigger — in that case the tool tells you and doesn't create a file. Your original is unchanged, and nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
The quality dropped too much.
Try again with “Light (200 dpi)”, and leave grayscale off to keep the colors.
Can I compress and keep the text searchable?
In a browser it's hard to recompress only the images inside a PDF, so whole pages are converted. If you need searchable text, keep the original or split the document instead.
Does it work with very large PDFs?
Pages are processed one at a time, so hundreds of pages are possible, but it may take a while on a phone.
Related tools
- Merge PDFCombine PDFs in any order and pick page ranges from each file
- Compress ImageShrink JPG and PNG photos to a target size like 300 KB — batch, ZIP
- PDF to JPGSave each page as JPG or PNG, choose the resolution, ZIP for multiple pages
- Split PDFSplit by page ranges, every N pages or into single pages — download as ZIP
- Extract PDF PagesClick thumbnails or type page numbers to save them as a new PDF
- Delete PDF PagesClick thumbnails or type page numbers to remove pages and save