Shrink a PDF File
Reduce a PDF's File Size Without Extra Software
Need to use Shrink a PDF File right now?
See the exact before/after size once compression completes, so you can judge whether the result meets your target.
Drop a PDF, or click to browse
Processed locally in your browser — never uploaded
Works by re-rendering each page as a compressed image, which is most effective on image-heavy or scanned PDFs. This converts text to image pixels, so text becomes non-selectable and non-searchable in the output — a real trade-off, not a bug.
Features
- Runs entirely in your browser
- Privacy-first — your data is never uploaded
- Real-time, instant results
- 100% free, no sign-up required
- Works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- No installation needed
Who uses this tool?
About Shrink a PDF File
A PDF full of high-resolution scans or images can quickly balloon to a size that's awkward to email, slow to upload, or over a hard limit set by whatever service you're sending it to. This tool shrinks a PDF's file size by re-rendering every page as a compressed image at a resolution and quality level you control, trading some fidelity for a dramatically smaller file — most effective on image-heavy or scanned documents where there's real compression headroom to reclaim.
Two sliders control the trade-off: image quality (how aggressively JPEG compression discards detail, from 20% for maximum shrinkage to 95% for near-original fidelity) and resolution (a scale multiplier from 0.75x to 2.5x controlling how many pixels each rendered page contains). Lower values on either produce smaller files at the cost of visual fidelity, and the two interact — a document only needs enough resolution to look good at its intended viewing size, so dropping resolution before dropping quality percentage is often the more effective lever.
Under the hood, every page is rendered to a canvas at the chosen scale, exported as a JPEG at the chosen quality, and re-embedded as a full-page image in a freshly built PDF — this is fundamentally different from optimizing an existing PDF's internal image streams (which some server-side compressors do), and it's why this approach works even on PDFs with vector text or graphics, not just ones already full of images.
The size before and after is shown once compression completes, so you can judge whether the result meets your target size before committing to the download. Because every page becomes a rendered image, the output's text is no longer selectable or searchable — a real trade-off inherent to this approach, and one worth knowing about if the document's text needs to remain searchable after compressing.
How it works
- Upload your PDF. The file loads ready for compression.
- Adjust quality and resolution. Lower values shrink the file more; higher values preserve more detail.
- Compress and download. See the before/after size, then download the smaller PDF.
Examples
Shrinking a scanned document for email
Input
18 MB scanned PDF, 60% quality, 1.5x resolution
Output
~4 MB PDF, dramatically smaller and still readable