Compress PDF
Almost all of a heavy PDF's weight is photographs. This squeezes those, and only those — the text, the vectors and the links come through untouched.
Runs on your device. Nothing is uploaded.
or drop it here
How hard should it squeeze?
Light barely touches the photos. Strong makes the file much smaller, and the photos visibly softer. Balanced is the one to try first.
Before
After
The same page, before and after. Look at the photographs — the text and the layout are never touched.
What this will not do
Many compressors reach their impressive numbers by flattening every page into a picture. The file does get smaller, and the document dies: the text is no longer text, the words cannot be searched or copied, and a screen reader finds nothing at all.
This tool refuses that trade. If a PDF is nothing but text, there is very little to squeeze, and it will tell you so honestly instead of destroying the file to show a number.
Scans and photos
A scanned document or a file full of photographs is where the real savings are, and often the file drops to a fraction of its size with no visible difference.
That includes scans stored as bare pixels — the enormous kind a phone or a scanner often produces, which most compressors walk straight past because they are only looking for photographs. Those are usually the very files people are trying to shrink.
When it refuses
Pictures in formats we cannot fully understand — one bit per pixel, a fixed palette, a fax encoding — are left exactly as they are. A picture we would have to guess at is a picture we must not rewrite.