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Compress a PDF
Make a PDF small enough to email or upload. Choose how hard to squeeze: without losing a pixel, or by re-encoding large photos and scans.
Drop a PDF here
- Lossless by default
- Strong for scans and photos
- Password option too
How it works
How to compress a PDF
Open the PDF
Drop the file here or choose it. The editor opens it with the download options.
Choose the compression
Standard is the default and changes nothing you can see; Strong makes scans and photos much smaller.
Download
Sign in with a free account and download the smaller file.
What you get
Smaller, the way you choose
Standard: lossless
Duplicate and unused objects are removed and the rest is packed into compressed streams. Text and images stay exactly as they were.
Strong: for scans and photos
Images of 400,000 pixels or more are saved as JPEG at quality 70 and at most 2,000 pixels on the longer side.
Edit first
Delete pages nobody needs before you compress: it is the surest way to a smaller file.
Protect it too
The same options can put a password on the file (AES-256) and make forms read-only.
FAQ
Questions and answers
Will compression make my PDF blurry?
Standard compression changes nothing you can see. Strong compression re-encodes large images, so very fine detail in photos and scans may soften.
Why did my PDF hardly shrink?
A PDF that is mostly text is small already. Strong compression helps most with scans and photos; deleting pages helps with any file.
Is my file kept after compression?
It stays in your account until you delete it; deleted documents can be restored from the trash for 30 days.
Do I need an account?
Yes, a free one: compression applies when you download, and downloads are only for the file’s owner.