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Compress PDF

Shrink a PDF by recompressing its embedded images. Works well on scanned documents; does little for text-only PDFs.

This file never leaves your device

Compress a PDF without uploading it — and what it can actually do

Most PDF compression requests come from an upload form with a size cap: a job portal that wants a resume under 2MB, a government form that rejects anything over 500KB, an exam application that will not accept your scanned marksheet. Those files are personal, and the usual fix is to hand them to a website that uploads them.

This compressor works differently. It opens your PDF in the browser, finds the images embedded inside it, recompresses them at a lower quality, and writes a new PDF — all on your device.

It is worth being direct about what this does and does not do, because most compression tools are not. This approach shrinks scanned documents substantially, because a scan is essentially a stack of large images and the images are where all the bytes are. It does very little for a text-only PDF — an invoice generated by software, a report exported from Word — because in those files the bytes are text and font data, not images. If your PDF barely shrinks, the tool will say so on screen rather than quietly returning a file the same size.

How to use it

  1. Open the compress tool and select the PDF you want to make smaller.
  2. Press Compress PDF. The images inside the file are recompressed in your browser.
  3. Check the before-and-after size shown on screen.
  4. Download the compressed PDF.

Questions

Why did my PDF not get any smaller?
Almost certainly because it is a text-based PDF rather than a scan. This tool reduces size by recompressing embedded images, so a document with no meaningful images has nothing for it to shrink. Scanned documents typically compress a lot; software-generated documents typically do not.
How much smaller will a scanned PDF get?
It depends on how the scan was made, but a large reduction is common for scans saved at high quality. The tool shows you the exact before-and-after size so you can judge the result rather than take a claim on trust.
Does compressing reduce the quality of my document?
Yes, for the images inside it — that is how the size reduction is achieved. Text and vector content are unaffected. For scanned documents the result normally stays comfortably readable, but you should look at the output before submitting it somewhere that matters.
Can I compress a PDF to a specific target size, like 200KB?
Not currently. The tool applies one recompression pass and reports the resulting size rather than iterating towards a target.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Every tool on this site runs inside your browser tab using WebAssembly. Your file is read from your disk into the tab's memory, processed there, and written back out as a download. It is never sent over the network, so there is no server copy to leak, subpoena, or forget to delete.
Do I need to create an account?
No. There is no signup, no email, and no login on any tool. You can use every tool an unlimited number of times without identifying yourself.
Is there a file size limit or a daily limit?
There is no daily limit and no artificial size cap. The real ceiling is your device's memory: roughly 200-500MB per file on a desktop, and closer to 50-100MB on a low-end Android phone. Past that the browser tab can run out of memory.
Is the output watermarked?
No. Output files are clean. Nothing is stamped on them, and no page is added.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The tools run in any modern mobile browser, including Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. Large files are slower on a phone than on a laptop because the processing happens on the device itself.
Does it work without an internet connection?
You need a connection to load the page the first time. Once the page has loaded, the actual PDF processing needs no network at all — you can turn off your Wi-Fi before pressing the button and the tool will still work.