Compress PDF
Make a heavy file small enough to email, without wrecking it.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Before you start
- Set the limit you actually have to meet — an email cap or a portal's "under 500 KB" — and it retries until the file fits.
- Scans and photo-heavy files shrink the most; a file that is mostly text has little to squeeze.
- Need to send it now? Share or save it to Drive or OneDrive straight from the result.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
Add your file
Drop in the PDF you want to shrink. It is read straight from your device — there is no upload, so even a 200 MB scan starts instantly.
Set it up the way you want
Type the size you are aiming for, in MB, or pick one of the quick targets under the box. Compression works on the images first: it lowers their quality and only scales them down if quality alone is not enough. The file’s structure is packed tighter as well — on a mostly-text document that is the whole saving, with no quality lost. Your text stays real text, so the file remains searchable and selectable.
Download the result
You get the smallest file that still meets your target, plus a line telling you the before and after size. If the target could not be reached, it says so and explains why instead of quietly handing you a file that is still too big.
Uploading to a portal with a size limit?
Open your portal’s page and the target size is already set.
Questions about Compress PDF
- Will compressing blur my text?
- No. Only images are recompressed. The text layer is left untouched, which means the result is still searchable, selectable and copyable. Tools that rasterize whole pages destroy that; this one does not.
- What if it cannot reach the size I asked for?
- It tells you. There are three separate reasons it will report: the file is already smaller than your target, the target is below what the pages can physically hold, or the images were already at minimum quality. You never get a silent failure.
- Are transparent images and masks handled?
- They are skipped, on purpose, and the count is reported to you. Recompressing an image with an alpha channel through JPEG would turn transparent areas black. Leaving them alone costs some size but never ruins the page.