Compress a PDF
Shrink a PDF by recompressing the photos inside it. Text, fonts and drawings are left exactly as they were, so the result is still searchable and still sharp.
Photos capped at 1600 pixels and large lossless images turned into JPEG. Right for email and uploads.
Drop a PDF. Only the images inside it are recompressed, so text stays text.
Your file is processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
What actually makes a PDF large
Almost always, pictures. A single photo from a modern phone is three or four megabytes and a PDF built from ten of them is forty megabytes of which the text is a rounding error. Scanners are similar: a page scanned at 600 DPI in colour is a large photograph of a sheet of paper. The rest of a PDF, the text, fonts and drawing instructions, is usually small.
So this tool goes straight to the images. Each one is decoded, scaled down to a sensible maximum for the chosen level and saved again as a JPEG and it replaces the original only if it came out meaningfully smaller.
What it leaves alone
Everything that isn’t a photograph. Text stays text, so the document remains searchable and accessible to screen readers. Vector graphics such as charts and logos stay vectors, so they are still sharp at any zoom. Images that are already small, masks and images with special colour handling are skipped, since recompressing them saves little and risks changing how they look.
That is the difference from the common alternative, which renders each page to an image and builds a new PDF from those. It shrinks reliably and it silently turns a searchable document into a stack of pictures of text.
If you need to hit an exact limit
Start with Balanced and step up to Strong. If it still doesn’t fit, the PDF is probably carrying pages you don’t need: delete them orsplit the document and send it in parts. For a PDF built from your own photos, compressing the photos beforebuilding the PDF gives you the most control of all.
Common questions
How much smaller will my PDF get?
It depends entirely on what the PDF contains. A document made from phone photos or scans often shrinks by 70 to 90 percent. A report with a few charts might drop by a third. A PDF that is only text barely changes, because text is already tiny and the size is mostly embedded fonts.
Will the text still be searchable?
Yes. Only the image streams inside the PDF are replaced. Text, fonts, links, form fields and vector drawings are carried over unchanged, so you can still search, select and copy exactly as before. Many online compressors turn every page into a picture to shrink it, which destroys all of that.
Why did my file not get smaller?
Either the PDF has no images or its images are already compressed about as far as they sensibly go. The tool only replaces an image if the new version is meaningfully smaller and never hands back a file larger than the one you gave it.
Which level should I choose?
Light if the document may be printed. Balanced for email attachments and upload forms, which is right most of the time. Strong when a portal has a hard limit and the file still doesn’t fit; images will look soft if printed, but fine on a screen.
Is my PDF uploaded to be compressed?
No. It is compressed in this browser tab. That matters here, because the PDFs people most need to shrink are application packs, bank statements, medical letters and identity documents for upload portals.
Guides
The other tools
All of them work the same way: the file is read in your browser and never uploaded.