Compress a PDF without uploading it anywhere.
Shrink a PDF to fit an email attachment, an upload limit, or a tight inbox. Drop your file, pick a quality level, and we'll compress it right in your browser. Works on scans, slide decks, and image-heavy reports.
Compression didn't help on this file.
Your PDF was already efficient — compressing it wouldn't have saved any meaningful space, and quality would have suffered. Try a more aggressive setting, or save the original unchanged with the button below.
-
Genuinely private
Your PDF stays in your browser tab the entire time. No upload, no server, no trace. Open DevTools while it runs — you'll see zero network requests carrying your file.
-
Honest about results
If compression doesn't actually save meaningful space — sometimes PDFs are already as small as they can be — we'll tell you instead of handing back a quality-degraded file with the same size.
-
Tuned for the common case
Most PDFs people want to shrink are scanned documents and image-heavy slide decks. Our compression typically cuts those by 60–90%. The "Balanced" preset covers most uses well.
How it works
- 1
Drop your PDF
Drag the file onto the box above, or click to browse. Any size — the only ceiling is your device's memory.
- 2
Pick a quality level
Small file for max savings (good on a phone screen). Balanced for crisp on-screen reading with strong savings. High quality for print-friendly resolution and smaller savings.
- 3
Compress, then save
Each page gets re-rendered locally and re-encoded as a JPEG, then bundled into a new PDF. The result lands in your downloads folder.
Frequently asked questions
How does compression actually work?
Every page of your PDF gets re-rendered to an image and re-encoded as a JPEG at your chosen quality. Those JPEGs are bundled into a new PDF. JPEG compression is what makes images small for web use, and applying it to PDF pages is the same idea — fewer bytes per page, smaller file.
Why does the text become a picture?
Because re-rendering pages turns everything — text, lines, images, all of it — into pixels. The output looks identical to your eyes, but text isn't text anymore; it's an image of text. You won't be able to select, copy, or search it. For most documents people want to shrink (scans, slides, photos), this is actually fine — there's no selectable text in those to begin with.
What kinds of PDFs compress well?
Image-heavy PDFs compress dramatically. Scanned documents, marketing brochures, slide decks with photos, image-rich reports — typically 60–90% size reduction. Text-heavy PDFs that are already small don't have much room to shrink; for those, our tool will detect the lack of savings and tell you to keep the original.
What if compression doesn't help?
We'll tell you. If the compressed output isn't at least 5% smaller than the input, we treat that as "no meaningful savings" and surface a notice rather than hand you a worse file. You can save the original unchanged from there, or try a more aggressive quality setting.
Is the original file modified?
No. Your original PDF on disk is untouched. We read it into memory, build a new compressed PDF, and offer that as a download with a new filename. The original sits exactly where it was.
Does this work on mobile?
Yes, though large files may take longer than on a desktop because the rendering is CPU-heavy. Tap the drop zone to open the file picker; tap save when done. For very large scans (200+ pages), a laptop is more comfortable.
What about password-protected PDFs?
PDFs that need a password to open can't be compressed — we'd need the password to read them, and we'd rather not ask. PDFs with only an editing/printing restriction (but no view password) work fine.