Compress PDF

Shrinks a PDF by re-rendering each page as a JPEG image at the resolution and quality you choose.

By The FreeImageEditor editorial teamLast reviewed How we test

Drop a PDF here

PDF · up to 100 MB · processed on your device

Pages rasterised and re-encoded to reduce file size.

How to use it

  1. 1Add the PDF and read the original size.
  2. 2Choose a resolution — screen, standard or print — and a JPEG quality.
  3. 3Compress, compare the before and after size, then download.

Be clear about the trade-off

This compressor rasterises: every page is rendered and stored as a JPEG. On scanned documents and image-heavy brochures that typically removes 60 to 90 percent of the size with no visible difference at reading distance.

On a text document it has a real cost — the text stops being text. It will not be selectable, searchable or reflowable afterwards, and at low resolutions small type softens. The tool states this on screen before you run it, and shows you the result so you can judge it yourself.

Choosing settings

Screen resolution (roughly 96 DPI) suits anything that will only ever be read on a display and is the setting that clears a 10 MB email limit. Standard (150 DPI) is the safe default for a document that might be printed casually. Print (300 DPI) barely shrinks a scan but does re-encode oversized embedded photos.

Quality 70 to 80 is the sweet spot. Below 60, JPEG artefacts start showing around text edges.

Frequently asked questions

Will the text still be searchable?
No. Rasterising converts text to pixels. If searchable text matters, keep the original and send the compressed copy only where size is the constraint.
My file got bigger. Why?
A short text-only PDF has almost nothing to compress, and page images are larger than the vector text they replaced. For those files, compression is the wrong tool.
Is there a size limit?
100 MB, set by how much a browser tab can hold in memory while rendering.