PDF compressor
Compress PDFs in your browser: shrink scans and photo-heavy documents while keeping text selectable. Files are never uploaded.
About PDF compressor
A large PDF is rarely large because of its text. The weight is in the images: every page of a scan is a high-resolution photo, and reports or catalogues often embed full-size phone pictures. This tool uses Ghostscript to resample those images to a resolution that suits the purpose and recompress them, while text, fonts and layout stay as they are. Everything happens in your browser.
When you would use it
- An email attachment is over the size limit (usually 10 to 25 MB) and needs to be smaller before sending.
- A government, school or job site only accepts uploads up to a certain size.
- Contracts, receipts or IDs scanned with a phone take several MB per page and you want to archive or send them.
- A report or catalogue with many photos should be lighter without hurting readability.
How to use it
- Pick a compression level: "Balanced" in most cases, "Smallest file" to send or read on screen, "High quality" to print.
- Drop one or more PDFs on the area above, or click to select them. The first time, the compression engine (about 15 MB) is downloaded.
- Wait for the processing to finish. Progress is shown per page, and the size before and after is listed at the end.
- Click "Download" to save the compressed file. Not happy with it? Pick another level and click "Compress again with current setting".
Things worth knowing
- Results depend on the content: scans and photo-heavy PDFs often shrink by half or more, sometimes by 90%. Text-only PDFs are already small and may barely change.
- "Smallest file" brings images down to 72 dpi. That is fine on screen, but photos and small print can look blurry when printed. Use "High quality" for documents you will print.
- If the result would be larger than the original, the tool says so and keeps the original instead of offering the bigger file. It usually means the PDF was already optimised.
- Password-protected PDFs cannot be processed; remove the password with the original software first. Compression rewrites the file, so digital signatures become invalid and interactive forms may not be fully preserved. Check the result for important documents.
- Everything runs in your browser and PDFs are never uploaded. Very large files (over 100 MB) may fail because of limited memory, especially on phones; a computer works better for those.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I still select and search the text after compression?
- Yes. Only the images are recompressed; text stays text and can be selected, searched and copied. If the original is a scan without text recognition, it remains an image after compression too.
- Why do some PDFs barely get smaller?
- Most of a PDF's size comes from images. Files that are mainly text or vector graphics, or that were already compressed by another tool, have little room left to shrink.
- What is the difference between the three levels?
- The image resolution: Smallest file uses 72 dpi, Balanced 150 dpi and High quality 300 dpi. A lower resolution gives a smaller file but looks blurrier when zoomed in or printed.
- Are my files uploaded?
- No. The Ghostscript engine is downloaded to your browser and runs on your device, so your PDFs never leave your computer or phone.