Most PDF bloat comes from oversized embedded images — a phone-scanned document at full camera resolution, or a report with uncompressed screenshots pasted in. This tool re-renders every page at a quality level you choose and rebuilds the file around much smaller images, which is exactly the technique that gives the biggest wins on scanned or image-heavy PDFs. It trades selectable text for file size, so it's best suited to documents you need to shrink for sharing rather than ones you still need to edit or search.
How to use the compress pdf tool
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drop in the file you want to shrink.
- 2
Pick a quality level
Choose High quality, Balanced, or Smallest size depending on how much you need to shrink it.
- 3
Compress and download
Click Compress PDF and download the result once it finishes — usually a few seconds per page.
Common use cases
Fit an email attachment limit
Shrink a large scanned document below a 10–25 MB attachment cap.
Speed up an upload form
Reduce file size before submitting to a portal with strict upload limits.
Save storage space
Compress an archive of old PDFs before backing them up.
Frequently asked questions
Each page is re-rendered as a JPEG image at the quality level you choose, then reassembled into a new PDF. This works especially well on scanned or image-heavy documents.