Compress PDF
Shrink a large, image-heavy PDF — free, instant, entirely on your device.
Drop a PDF here
Nothing is uploaded to a server
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How PDF compression works here
Drop your PDF in, choose a compression level, and the tool re-renders each page as a compressed JPG at that quality, then rebuilds the pages into a new PDF — this is especially effective on PDFs that are large because of embedded high-resolution images or scans.
For example, a PDF built from several high-resolution scanned pages can often be reduced dramatically for emailing, while text-heavy PDFs made from an original document (rather than a scan) will compress less dramatically since there's less image data to shrink.
An honest note on this approach
Because each page is re-rendered as an image, any selectable text in the original PDF becomes part of a flattened image and is no longer selectable or searchable in the compressed output. This trade-off is worth it for scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs, but if you need to preserve selectable text, this isn't the right tool for that file.
What makes a PDF large in the first place
Most oversized PDFs are large because of the images embedded inside them, not the text — a scanned document saved at full camera resolution, or a report full of high-resolution screenshots, can easily balloon past the size most email providers and upload forms allow. Compressing a PDF works by re-encoding those embedded images at a lower resolution and quality, which is where the vast majority of the size reduction comes from.
Text and vector content inside the PDF are unaffected by this process, so words stay just as sharp — it's specifically the photographic and scanned content that gets lighter. A PDF that's mostly text to begin with won't shrink dramatically, since there's little image data to compress.
Text stays sharp either way
Because compression specifically targets the embedded images rather than the document's text layer, a compressed PDF's words remain exactly as sharp and selectable as before — you can still search, copy and select text normally after compressing. This makes it a safe step for reports, contracts and forms where the text needs to stay perfectly legible even as the file gets smaller.
The recompression runs through a PDF manipulation library loaded into your browser tab, reading the embedded images, re-encoding them at a lower size, and rebuilding the document locally without any of it passing through a server.
Frequently asked questions
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