Compress PDF

Pick a level, preview the projected savings, and download. Because everything runs locally in your browser, you can compress sensitive documents (tax records, medical scans, signed contracts) without ever sending them to a third-party server.

The mechanism is honest to describe: each page is rendered to an image at a level-specific resolution and re-encoded as a JPEG, then reassembled into a new PDF. That's why it works so well on scanned documents, since a scan is already just a picture of a page, there's no text to damage. "Recommended" renders at full resolution with moderate JPEG quality, which is visually lossless for most documents; "Strong" drops both the resolution and the quality further, which is more noticeable on photographs than on scanned text.

The one tradeoff worth knowing before you run it: because every page becomes a flattened image, any real selectable, searchable, copyable text in the original PDF does not survive compression, the output page looks identical but is a picture of the text, not the text itself. If you need to keep a document searchable after shrinking it, that's a genuine limitation of image-based compression in general, not just here. Run OCR PDF afterward to add a searchable text layer back on top of the compressed pages, or, if the file is mostly born-digital text rather than scans, look at whether you actually need compression at all, text-only PDFs are rarely large enough to need it.

Because compression runs entirely in your browser tab, the practical limit on file size is your device's memory rather than an upload cap: a 200-page scanned PDF re-encodes on an ordinary laptop, it just takes longer than a 10-page one. Smaller PDFs are easier to email, faster to load on a slow connection, and cheaper to store, this tool exists for the common case of a scan or export that's bigger than it needs to be for how it'll actually be used.