Compress PDF
100% private — runs on your device, never uploaded. Works offline once loaded.
Shrink a large PDF — especially scanned or image-heavy documents — with a quality preset, or binary-search JPEG quality to hit an exact KB target for email/portal limits. Everything runs locally.
What happens when you compress a PDF
A PDF is really a container that can hold vector text, fonts, and raster images side by side. When a page is mostly a photo or a scan, the file is dominated by that embedded image data — and that's what this tool targets. Each page is re-rendered at the quality level you pick, then re-encoded using JPEG-style lossy compression, the same math a camera uses when it saves a photo: it throws away colour detail the human eye barely notices in exchange for a much smaller file.
This is why a 40-page scanned contract can drop from 60MB to under 3MB with barely a visible difference, while a 40-page Word-exported PDF that's already mostly text may shrink only a little — there isn't much image weight to remove in the first place.
Where this actually saves the day
The most common trigger is an upload cap you can't argue with: many Indian government exam and college admission portals accept PDFs only under 100KB–2MB, visa and passport application forms often cap attachments around 1MB, and job portals reject resumes or certificates over a few MB. Phone scanning apps are the other repeat offender — a 10-page document photographed page-by-page can easily balloon past 50MB before compression.
- College/exam portal uploads with strict KB limits
- Emailing scanned documents that exceed a provider's attachment cap
- Archiving years of scanned paperwork without eating your cloud storage quota
- Sending a signed contract back over a slow or metered connection
The trade-off you're accepting
Because compression rebuilds each page as an image, any text on the page is no longer selectable, searchable, or copy-pasteable afterward — it's pixels, not characters. That's fine for a scanned form nobody needs to search, but it's the wrong tool if you need to keep a text-heavy report searchable; in that case, look for a PDF optimiser that strips unused fonts and metadata instead of rasterising pages.
A quick tip
Start at a medium quality setting and check page 1 before committing — text under about 8pt is the first thing to blur if you push compression too aggressively, so it's worth eyeballing a dense paragraph or a signature block before you send the file off.
Frequently asked questions
How does it compress the PDF?
Each page is re-rendered as an optimised JPEG at your chosen quality (or searched until your KB target is met). Text in the output becomes part of the page image.
Are my PDFs uploaded?
No — compression happens on your device and your files stay private.
Can I hit an exact size?
Use Target size (KB). It gets as close as possible; some PDFs cannot shrink under very tight limits without becoming unreadable.
Will the text in my PDF still be selectable after compressing?
No. Compression re-renders every page as an image, so any text becomes part of that image and can no longer be selected, searched, or copied — even though it still looks like text.
How much smaller will my file actually get?
It depends entirely on what's on the page: scanned or photographed documents can shrink by 80–95%, while PDFs that are already mostly typed text with few images may only shrink modestly.
Can I compress a PDF that already has a password on it?
You'll need to remove the password first — encrypted PDFs can't be read and re-rendered by the compressor until they're unlocked.
What quality level should I pick for a document I need to print later?
Use a higher quality setting for anything destined for print, since low settings are tuned for on-screen legibility and can look noticeably soft on paper.
Does compressing the file multiple times shrink it further?
Re-compressing an already-compressed PDF gives diminishing returns and just adds more generational quality loss each pass — it's better to start from the original file and pick a lower quality once.
Is there a limit to how many pages or how large a PDF I can compress?
The tool works entirely in your browser's memory, so very large files (several hundred MB or hundreds of pages) may be slower or run into your device's memory limits rather than any artificial cap we impose.
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