What the PDF Compress tool does

PDF Compress reduces a PDF's file size by re-rendering each page and re-saving it at a lower image quality. It's aimed squarely at scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs, where most of the file weight comes from embedded photos or scans rather than text.

How it works

Each page is rendered onto a canvas at a fixed resolution, then re-encoded as a JPEG at the quality percentage you set before being rebuilt into a new PDF. Because every page becomes a flattened image, this approach shrinks scans and photo-heavy pages dramatically — but it also means any selectable text on the original page becomes part of the image and is no longer selectable or searchable afterward.

How to use it

1. Upload the PDF you want to shrink.
2. Set the quality slider — lower values mean a smaller file and softer detail.
3. Press Compress and wait for each page to process.
4. Check the before/after size, then download.

Quality and file-size trade-offs

Scanned or photo-heavy PDFs typically shrink a lot, often by more than half. A PDF that's mostly crisp vector text may not shrink much, and can occasionally grow slightly, since rasterizing text is rarely more efficient than the original text data — the tool flags this if it happens so you're not caught off guard.

Common use cases

Useful for getting a scanned contract under an email attachment limit, shrinking a photo-filled portfolio PDF for faster sharing, or reducing storage space for a large batch of scanned receipts or forms.

If your PDF is mostly text with only a few images, PDF Compress may not help much since the size gain from rasterizing text can offset the savings from smaller images — in that case, the file is likely already close to its practical minimum.