Compress a PDF
Shrink a scanned or photo-heavy PDF until it fits — and be told plainly when this is the wrong tool for your file.
Free · No sign-up · Your file never leaves your computer
No file handy? — generated here, not downloaded.
Compressed pages are images. The text will no longer be searchable or selectable — if you need that, send the original instead.
How to use it
- 1
Choose the PDF.
- 2
Pick a level. Balanced suits almost everything.
- 3
Compress, and check the before and after sizes.
- 4
Download — but read the warning first if there is one.
When you would use this
Compressing a PDF is nearly always about a limit: an email that bounces, a portal that refuses anything over 5 MB, a client whose inbox rejects the drawing set.
What this actually does, and the cost, in one paragraph. Each page is rendered to an image, that image is re-encoded as a JPEG at a lower quality, and a new PDF is built from the results. On the documents people usually bring here — scans, photographs, drawing sets exported as rasters — that is dramatic, often 70 to 90 percent, with no meaningful loss. But it means the text stops being text. A compressed page cannot be searched, selected or copied afterwards. If any of that matters, this is the wrong tool and you should send the file as it is.
It will usually make a text-only PDF larger. This surprises people and it should not: a page of type is stored as instructions — a font, some positions, some characters — which is extraordinarily compact. Turn it into pixels and you are storing millions of dots to describe what a few hundred bytes described perfectly. A contract exported from Word is already close to as small as it can get.
So the tool measures both sizes and tells you when it has not helped, rather than handing back a bigger file and letting you discover it when the email bounces again. That is the commonest failure in this category — a compressor that always claims success.
If your document is a mix, split it: compress the scanned pages, leave the typed ones alone, and merge the two back together. It is three steps and it keeps the text searchable where it exists.
Everything happens in your browser, which is why a long document takes a moment — every page is being rendered on your machine rather than in a data centre. It is also why the scan of your signed contract is not sitting on anybody's server afterwards.
Questions
- My file got BIGGER. Why?
- Because it was a text PDF. This works by turning pages into images, and a page of crisp text is cheap to store as drawing instructions and expensive as pixels. If your PDF is mostly text, it is already about as small as it gets — the tool tells you rather than handing back a worse file.
- Can I still search or copy the text afterwards?
- No, and this is the real cost. Every page becomes a picture, so the text stops being text. If you need it searchable, do not compress it this way — send it as it is, or split out the pages you actually need.
- What does it work well on?
- Scans and photograph-heavy documents. A scanned contract or a set of site photographs exported to PDF often drops by 70–90% with no meaningful loss, because those pages were already images.
- Which level should I use?
- Balanced, unless it is going to a printer — then Light. Use Strong only when a hard upload limit is the whole problem, and check the result before sending it.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. Every page is rendered and re-encoded inside your browser, which is also why a long document takes a moment.
Related tools
Compressing because the drawing set will not fit in an email
Ofivio issues drawings from the project rather than as attachments, so the recipient opens the current sheet at full quality and nothing has to be squeezed through an inbox.
See Ofivio