PDF Compressor
Make a heavy PDF small enough to email or upload. Pick a quality, press one button, and see exactly how many bytes you saved.
Click to choose a PDF, or drag & drop it
PDF only · processed in your browser, never uploaded
Lower means a smaller file and a softer page. 70 is the usual sweet spot for scans and documents.
How many pixels each page is rendered at. 144 dpi is more than enough for on-screen reading and printing on a home printer.
Done
What this tool does
This tool takes a PDF that is too large to email, upload or attach, and rebuilds it as a much smaller one. Each page is rendered at the resolution you choose and re-encoded as a JPEG, and a new document is assembled from those images.
That approach suits the files that are actually too big — scans, photo-heavy exports, and slide decks that were exported at full resolution — because in those the bytes are almost entirely image data, and re-encoding an image at a lower resolution is precisely what saves the space. It is also the reason for the trade-off: the result is a picture of each page, so text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable. There is no lossless mode here, and the tool does not pretend otherwise.
How to use it
- Drop your PDF onto the box, or click it to choose a file. The file size appears underneath, and the options panel opens.
- Set JPEG quality and Resolution. Quality controls how aggressively each page image is compressed; resolution controls how many pixels each page is rendered at.
- Press Compress PDF. Progress is reported page by page — the renderer works through one page at a time by design, so a long scan will not run your browser out of memory.
- The new file downloads automatically. The panel shows the before and after size, so you can see what the settings actually bought you and try again if it was not enough.
Common use cases
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Email attachment limits
Get a scanned contract or a photographed receipt under a 10 MB or 25 MB cap without splitting it into pieces.
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Upload portals
Government, university and job-application portals routinely reject files over a few megabytes. Compress once and the same document goes through.
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Slide decks and reports
A deck exported with full-resolution photography is often 40 MB. At 144 dpi it is usually a fraction of that and still reads perfectly on screen.
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Storage and archives
Shrink a folder of old scans before backing it up, where legibility matters far more than fidelity.
Frequently asked questions
Will my text still be selectable after compression?
No. The compressed file is rebuilt from page images, so text, links and form fields become part of the picture. That is inherent to how image-based compression works rather than a setting you can switch off. If selectable text matters, keep the original and compress a copy.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. The PDF is read by your own browser and the compressed file is generated on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere — which also means that once the page and its libraries have loaded, the tool keeps working if your connection drops.
How much smaller will my PDF get?
It depends entirely on what was in it. A 40 MB scan-heavy PDF typically drops to 2–6 MB at medium quality. A text-only PDF that was already written efficiently may not shrink at all, and the tool will say so rather than claim a win. If the result is not smaller, try a lower quality or resolution.