Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF without an upload: the embedded images are recomputed in your browser while the text is left untouched. For attachments too big to send.
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The PDF is processed locally in your browser and is never uploaded.
Guide: Compress PDF
A PDF is almost never made large by its text, but by the images inside it. A scanned contract, a quotation with product photos, an illustrated report — the words weigh a few kilobytes, the pictures several megabytes. That is exactly where this tool works: it finds the embedded images, recomputes them at the quality you choose, and writes them back into the same place.
The rest of the document is left alone. Text stays text and therefore stays searchable and selectable, vector graphics stay sharp, links and page order stay as they were. That is the difference from tools that turn every page into a picture: the file does get smaller, but a document becomes a stack of photos in which nothing can be found again.
How much comes out of it depends on the material. A 300 dpi scan can usually be cut to a quarter without anything showing on screen. A pure text document, on the other hand, holds nothing that could be recomputed — and then the tool says so, rather than claiming an improvement that is not there.
Typical use cases
Getting an attachment under the limit
Plenty of mailboxes refuse attachments over ten or twenty megabytes. A quotation pack with photos passes that quickly and is rejected without comment.
Scans out of the office machine
Copiers scan at full resolution in colour when in doubt. For a document that will only ever be filed and read, that is many times more than would be needed.
Uploading papers to a portal
Funding portals, tender platforms and insurers often set a hard per-file limit — and report the breach only after the whole form has been filled in.
Tidying up an archive
When years of receipts and reports sit on a drive, a factor of three in file size makes a noticeable difference to backups and to syncing.
Putting documentation on a website
A data sheet a visitor only sees after ten seconds of loading is usually not opened at all — especially on the mobile signal of a building site.
How to use it
Choose the PDF
Pick the file that should get smaller. It is opened purely inside your browser and transferred nowhere; even very large files are fine, they simply take a little longer.
Set the image quality
The slider controls how hard the contained images are recomputed. 65 per cent is a good starting point for documents read on screen; for a good-quality print run, stay closer to 80 per cent.
Limit the image width
A photo 4000 pixels wide gains nothing in an A4 document that is never printed larger than 2000 pixels. The width limit is therefore often the bigger lever than the quality — try 1600 pixels before lowering the quality further.
Check the result
After the download the saving is shown as a percentage under the button. Open the file once and look at the most image-heavy page: what looks good there looks good throughout the document.
What happens to your data
The file is opened, processed and saved again entirely inside your browser. None of it is transferred to a server and no copy comes into existence anywhere online — with contracts, personnel files and quotations that is the actual point, because a document you upload in order to shrink it is a document you have handed over.
Frequently asked questions
Does the text lose quality?
No. Only the embedded images are touched. Text stays text, stays searchable, stays sharp when zoomed, and can still be selected and copied.
Why does my file not get smaller?
Then it holds nothing that could be recomputed — either no images at all, or only images in a format deliberately left alone here, because a wrong assumption about colour space or bit depth would corrupt the page silently.
Can I compress several files at once?
One file is processed per run at the moment. With a batch it pays to test the setting once on the largest file and then apply it to the rest.
Is the document still valid afterwards?
The structure of the document is fully preserved. A digital signature is the exception: any change to the file invalidates it, and that is true of every tool alike.