Runs in your browser · nothing is uploaded
Compress a PDF.
The size you see is the size you get, measured before you download.
Drop a PDF here
or pick one from your device
Everything happens on your device
Reading…
Where the weight actually is
- Scans and photos
- shrinks a lot
- Slide decks, brochures
- shrinks some
- Text-only documents
- barely at all
A phone-camera scan carries far more pixels than a page needs.
A contract is text and fonts. There is no fat to take off, and we will say so rather than hand back the same file renamed.
50 MB per file · text stays selectable
Looking inside the file…
What is inside this PDF
Locked document
This PDF needs its password
How hard to squeeze
Measuring the real size…
By using this tool you agree to our terms and privacy policy
What it actually does
Only the pictures change
The images inside the file are decoded, scaled to the preset's ceiling, re-encoded as JPEG, and put back in the same slots. Nothing else in the document is rewritten.
- Text stays text
- Pages are not flattened into images. Text stays selectable and searchable, links keep working, form fields keep their values. That is the difference between this and a compressor that rasterises every page.
- The size is measured, not estimated
- Choosing a preset runs the whole compression in your browser and reports the size of the finished file. There is no prediction to be wrong about, and switching presets re-measures.
- A bigger file is never offered
- Each image keeps whichever version is smaller, and if the finished document is not smaller than the original, there is no download button — just a sentence saying so. Handing back a larger file under the word “compressed” is the one thing this tool will not do.
- Some images are left alone
- JPEG 2000, CCITT and JBIG2 images, unusual colour spaces, and soft masks are skipped rather than guessed at — the panel lists how many and why. A document that came back with its colours changed would be worse than one that stayed big.
Answers
Questions people ask
Why did my PDF not get smaller?
Because there were no images to work on. A contract, an invoice or an exported report is text, fonts and vector drawing — all of it already compressed, and none of it something we will throw detail away from. The panel says how much of your file is images before anything runs, so you can see the answer rather than guess at it.
Which preset should I pick?
Balanced, unless you have a reason. It caps images at roughly 200 DPI, which is more than a screen shows and enough for everyday printing. Pick Strong for something being emailed and read on a phone; pick Light when the document is going to a print shop. Each button shows the real resulting size, so you can compare all three before choosing.
Will the text get blurry?
Real text will not — it is never touched, and stays as sharp as the font can draw it at any zoom. Text inside a scanned image is part of that image, so it does soften; that is what the before-and-after view of page one is for, and why Light exists.
Do my files get uploaded?
No. The images are decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, in a background thread, and the finished file is handed straight back. We record only anonymous byte counts — never a filename or any page content.
Can I compress a scanned PDF that has no text layer?
Yes — a scan is exactly the case this tool is best at, often taking 60% or more off. If you also want the words to be searchable, run it through the PDF editor, which can read a scanned page with OCR.
Compress a PDF
Free, no account, no watermark, and the file never leaves your device.