A phone scan of a ten-page agreement can weigh more than an email attachment limit allows. This tool shrinks that kind of file by redrawing every page as a JPEG at a resolution and quality you choose, then rebuilding the PDF from those images at the original page sizes, entirely in your browser.

It is a blunt instrument and the copy here says so. Every page becomes a picture, so text is no longer selectable or searchable, and a PDF that was mostly text to begin with will usually come out larger, not smaller. The result panel shows the size before and after and tells you plainly when the run did not help.

Which files shrink and which do not

Scans, photographed documents and PDFs built from large photos shrink a great deal, because a page-sized JPEG at 110 dots per inch is far smaller than the multi-megapixel image that was embedded. That is the case this tool exists for.

PDFs that are mostly text, exported from Word, a browser or an accounting package, are already small. Their text is stored as compact drawing instructions, and turning each page into a JPEG replaces a few kilobytes of instructions with tens of kilobytes of pixels. The size goes up and the text stops being text. Keep the original in that case; the result banner will say so.

Resolution and quality

Resolution sets how many pixels each page is drawn with. 72 dpi is enough to read on screen and gives the smallest files; 110 dpi is a sensible middle for documents that will be viewed on screen and occasionally printed; 150 dpi keeps small print legible when printed at full size. None of these match a 300 dpi scan, so fine detail is lost at every setting.

JPEG quality runs from 50 to 90 percent. Lower values produce smaller files with visible softening and blocking around sharp edges such as text; 60 to 70 percent suits most scans. Try one setting, check the size and open the download to judge the look, then run again if needed. The original stays loaded so a second pass costs nothing.

What is lost in the rebuild

The output is a fresh PDF containing one JPEG per page and nothing else. Selectable text, links, bookmarks, form fields, comments and document metadata are not carried over, because none of them exist in a picture of the page. Page sizes are kept, and a page stored with a rotation flag is drawn the way it displays, so it stays the right way up.

If you need a smaller file that keeps its text, this is the wrong tool. Removing unneeded pages, or splitting a long document into parts, reduces size without touching what remains.

Reading the result

After a run, the result panel shows the original size, the new size and the percentage saved. If the new file is larger or the same size, the panel says the run did not help and explains why, and the download is still offered so you can inspect it. Trust the numbers over the button label: a tool called Compress can make a file bigger, and this one will tell you when it has.

Frequently asked questions