Shrink a PDF by recompressing what actually makes it heavy — the embedded photos and scans — while text, fonts, and links pass through untouched. Pick a level, see the exact before/after size and what was done, and download. Nothing is uploaded.
How to compress a PDF
- Drop your PDF.
- Pick a level — Balanced is right for nearly everything.
- Compress, check the savings readout, download.
Where PDF weight really comes from
Open a 20 MB PDF and the text in it accounts for a few dozen kilobytes; virtually all the rest is images — a phone-scanned contract at full camera resolution, screenshots pasted at 4K, photos dropped into a report straight off the camera. Those images are stored at far higher resolution and quality than any screen or printer will ever show. This tool finds each embedded JPEG, downsamples anything absurdly large, re-encodes at a sane quality, and swaps it back into the document — plus repacks the PDF’s internal structure for a further lossless trim.
What makes this compressor honest
Three behaviors you’ll notice. It only replaces an image when the result is genuinely smaller — already-tight images are kept, not churned. It skips what it can’t safely recompress (transparency masks, exotic encodings) rather than gambling with your document, and tells you how many it skipped. And when there’s simply nothing to squeeze — a text-only PDF — it says that plainly instead of celebrating a 1% “win”. Compression that lies about itself costs you at upload time; this one shows its work.
The limits, stated up front
Text and vector graphics are not touched, so documents made only of those barely shrink — they were never the problem. Image-based savings are lossy by nature: Balanced is visually transparent for reading and ordinary printing, Strong trades visible softness for size. If you need a hard target (“under 500 KB for the portal”), the compress-to-size tool automates the search; the Maximum level here re-renders pages as images for the biggest possible reduction (clearly labeled — text stops being selectable), and grayscale conversion doubles as heavy compression for print-bound documents.
Private by design
The documents people most need to shrink — signed contracts, bank statements, medical records — are exactly the ones that shouldn’t visit a stranger’s server. Here the whole pipeline runs on your device in a background thread. Close the tab and nothing remains.