Compress a PDF

Shrink a PDF by recompressing the images inside it — text stays sharp, selectable, and searchable. A maximum-shrink mode re-renders whole pages instead, for when size matters more than selectable text.

The usual reason to compress a PDF is that something won't accept it — an email attachment limit, an upload cap, a portal that silently rejects anything over a few megabytes. The default mode shrinks the file the way professional tools do: it recompresses the images inside the PDF and touches nothing else, so the text stays sharp, selectable, and searchable.

How Compress a PDF works

  1. Drop your file into the tool, or click to browse.
  2. Everything runs in your browser — no upload, no server, no waiting.
  3. Download your result straight to your device.

Good to know: A PDF's bulk is almost always its images, which is why the smart mode works so well on reports and brochures — and why it can't do much for a file that's images edge-to-edge, like a scan. For those, the maximum-shrink mode re-renders whole pages as compressed images: much smaller, but text stops being selectable. If you need to hit an exact number of kilobytes rather than 'smaller', use Compress PDF to exact size instead.

Common questions

Can I still search or select the text afterward?

In the default mode, yes — the text objects are never touched, only the images inside the file are recompressed. Only the maximum-shrink mode turns pages into pictures, and the tool says so before you pick it.

Why did my PDF barely shrink?

Either it's mostly text (text is tiny — there's little to remove), or its images were already efficiently compressed. The tool tells you which images it recompressed and which it left alone rather than silently re-encoding things that can't get smaller.

Why were some images left untouched?

Deliberate caution. Images involved in transparency, CMYK print-colour images, and encodings the browser can't decode with full confidence are skipped, because a compressor that corrupts one PDF in a hundred is worse than none.