Compress a PDF without uploading it

Give it a size limit — 500 KB, 800 KB, whatever the form demands — and it finds the highest quality that still fits. The file is opened and rewritten inside this page; it is never sent anywhere.

Files never leave your browser

Drop a PDF here or click to choose — one file at a time

Common limits: 500 KB for a transcript, 800 KB for a diploma, 1 MB for a signed letter, 2 MB for most job portals.

Automatic works out how much detail the size limit can actually afford. Set it yourself only if the result looks wrong.

On a scanned document this usually saves another 10–25% and you cannot see the difference. On anything with a coloured stamp, seal or signature, you can — leave it off for those.

Straight to a specific limit

If a form gave you an exact number, these pages open with the tool already set to it.

What this does to your file, in plain words

Every page is redrawn as a picture, that picture is compressed, and a new PDF is built around it at exactly the same paper size. That is what makes a scanned document shrink so far: the giant photograph of a page becomes a modest one.

It also means the text in the finished PDF is a picture of text. You will not be able to select it, copy it or search it any more.

For a scan or a phone photo of a document, nothing is lost — the file was already a picture and always has been. For a PDF that came out of Word, that is a real downgrade, and you should know it before you press the button rather than after. If your PDF has selectable text and is too big, the usual cause is images inside it, and exporting again from the original document with lower-resolution images will beat this tool.

Why the result lands just under the limit

Most PDF compressors give you three buttons — low, medium, high — and you find out afterwards whether the result fits. Ask this one for 800 KB and it searches for the highest quality that still fits under 800 KB, page by page, rolling any budget a near-empty page did not use forward to the pages that need it.

That matters more than it sounds. A file that comes back at 180 KB when the limit was 800 KB is not a success — it is 620 KB of sharpness given away for nothing, on a document somebody has to be able to read.

If the pages come out blurry

The limit is doing exactly what you asked; there is only so much detail that fits in a fixed number of bytes. Three things help, in this order:

  1. Turn on greyscale. On a black-and-white document this is close to free.
  2. Compress fewer pages into the same budget. If the form takes several files, split the document rather than crushing every page.
  3. Rescan at a lower resolution rather than scanning huge and shrinking. A 600 DPI scan pushed down to fit is always worse than a 200 DPI scan that fits already.

Whatever you do, open the result and read it yourself before you upload it. A file that meets the size rule but cannot be read will be rejected by a human, and that rejection arrives much later.

Common questions

Is my file uploaded?

No, and you can check rather than trust. The page is served with a connect-src 'self' content security policy, so the browser itself refuses any connection to another server. Open your browser's network tab, compress a file, and watch that nothing leaves. Better still: load this page once, disconnect from the internet, and use it offline.

Is there a page limit or a file size limit?

No fixed limit — the constraint is your device's memory, since each page is drawn at full size while it is being processed. Long documents work; they simply take a while, which is why there is a Stop button.

Will it work on a password-protected PDF?

No. Open it in a PDF reader first, save an unlocked copy, and use that. This tool will tell you plainly if that is the problem rather than failing silently.

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