Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF that's too big to email. The pictures inside are recompressed and everything else is left alone, so the words stay selectable. Your file never leaves this device.
Drop a PDF here
Your file stays on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
How to compress a PDF
- Drop the PDF onto the box above, or press “Choose a PDF file”.
- Choose how hard to squeeze it: “Maximum saving”, “Balanced” or “Light touch”.
- Press “Compress PDF” and see how much smaller it came out.
- Press “Download the compressed PDF” to save it.
What Compress PDF does
A PDF is usually too big for one reason: photographs. A page of text is a few kilobytes of drawing instructions, while a single phone photo is several megabytes of pixels, and a scanner makes a full-page photo of every page. Compressing a PDF means storing those pictures more cheaply, so the file fits an email or an upload form.
What it does
- Re-saves the images inside the file at a lower quality, and caps how many pixels wide they can be
- Leaves text, vector graphics, links and layout exactly as they were
- Shows you the before and after size, so you can judge the result before downloading
- Skips any image it cannot re-encode safely, and keeps the original whenever the new version would be larger
What it does not do
- Turn your pages into pictures; the words stay selectable, searchable and sharp in print
- Shrink a text-only PDF, which has no images to work on and is already compact
- Change the page size, so the document still prints at the dimensions it was made for
- Read text out of a scan, which is OCR and a different job
Last updated
Need to send this to someone?
Our sister site QRSansar hosts a document and gives you a short link and a QR code for it. That is handy for WhatsApp, a slide, a poster or a printed handout, and it avoids attachment size limits entirely. You can swap the file later and the link and QR code keep working.
Worth being clear about the difference: that is a hosting service, so your file is uploaded to it. Everything on PDFsansar stays on your device; sharing is the one job that cannot.
Share a document on QRSansar →Other tools
All free, and all run in this tab without uploading anything.
Compress PDF: common questions
Why is my PDF so big in the first place?
Almost always photographs. A page of text is a few kilobytes of instructions for drawing letters. One photo from a phone camera is several megabytes of pixels, and a scanner produces a full-page photo for every single page. That is why a 40-page report can be smaller than a 3-page scan.
How much smaller will my file get?
Scans and photo-heavy files often drop by half to three quarters. A PDF that is mostly text will barely move, because there was never much to remove. You are shown both sizes before you download, so you can decide whether the result is worth keeping.
Will the text still be selectable and searchable?
Yes. Only the pictures inside the file are re-saved. The text stays real text, the vector graphics stay vectors, and the layout does not shift. Many compressors take the shortcut of turning each page into one flat image, which does produce a small number but costs you selection, search, screen readers and print sharpness. This one does not do that.
Does compressing lose quality?
The images lose some, which is the entire mechanism: they are stored with less detail than before. Everything that is not an image is untouched and loses nothing. Pick Light touch if the file is going to print, and Maximum saving if it is going to a screen.
It said there are no pictures to compress. What now?
Your PDF is text and vector graphics, which are already about as compact as they get. There is nothing for this tool to work on, and any file it handed back would be the same size or larger. If it is still too big to send, splitting it into parts is usually the better answer.
Is there a file size limit?
None that we impose. The work happens in your browser using your own memory, so the real limit is your device. Very large scans on an old phone may run out of room where a laptop would cope.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read, recompressed and saved entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing is sent to us, which is also why the tool keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.