PDF Compressor

About the PDF Compressor

Email providers cap attachments at around 25 MB. Government, legal, and job application portals are usually stricter, often capping uploads at 10 MB or even 5 MB. Meanwhile, scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs balloon to fifty megabytes without trying. The Compressor shrinks a PDF by downsampling its embedded images and stripping unnecessary metadata, then hands you back a smaller file that still looks like the original.

How the compression works

• Pick a preset. Smallest, Balanced (the default), High Quality, Max Quality, or Custom. Each preset sets a target DPI for image rasterization and a JPEG quality value behind the scenes.
• Or tune it yourself. Custom mode lets you set DPI and JPEG quality directly when a preset is not quite the trade-off you want.
• Watch the progress. Compression runs page-by-page in your browser with a live progress bar, so you always know how far along it is on a long document.
• See the savings. Once it finishes, you get the original size, the compressed size, and the percentage reduction side by side, so you can decide whether to download or try a different preset.

Built for the size cap on the next form you have to upload

The Compressor is meant for the very specific moment when you have a PDF that is just a little too big for whatever you are about to do with it. A scanned tax document that will not attach to an email. A portfolio that exceeds the job application portal's upload limit. A long contract that the recipient's mail server keeps bouncing. A presentation export that needs to fit in a Slack message. There are no page caps, no watermarks, and no nag screens.

Common uses

• Shrinking a scanned document so it fits under an email attachment size cap.
• Compressing a portfolio or work sample PDF to meet a job application portal's upload limit.
• Reducing the size of a long contract or report before sending it to multiple recipients.
• Slimming down a heavy slide-deck export so it can be shared in a chat tool or wiki.
• Trimming archived PDFs before backing them up to cloud storage to save on quota.

Your file stays on your computer

The entire compressor runs in your browser. The PDF you load is never uploaded, never sent to a server, and never seen by anyone but you, even when it contains contracts, financial statements, or anything else sensitive. Close the tab and the file is gone from this tool entirely.

Common questions

How do I make a PDF smaller for email?

Drop the PDF in and download the compressed version: the reduction usually clears the common 10 MB and 25 MB attachment limits. Image-heavy and scanned PDFs shrink the most, since images are where the weight lives.

How much can a PDF be compressed?

Scanned documents often shrink 60 to 90 percent; text-based PDFs, already efficient, shrink less. The tool reports the before and after sizes so you know exactly what you gained.

Does compressing a PDF reduce its quality?

Compression re-encodes the images inside the PDF at practical quality while text stays perfectly sharp, since text is stored as text. For reading and submitting, the difference is rarely visible.

Is there a file size limit?

No. Because there is no upload, a 200 MB scan starts compressing the instant you drop it instead of failing an uploader's size check.

Is it safe to compress confidential documents?

Yes: the compression runs entirely in your browser, so legal, financial, and medical PDFs never leave your machine.

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