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Compress a PDF

Reduce PDF file size by re-encoding page images at the quality you choose, or strip metadata losslessly. Free, private, and nothing is uploaded.

  • Files never leave your device
  • Free, no sign-up
  • No watermark

Good to know: Re-encoding turns each page into an image: great for scans, but text stops being selectable. Use "strip metadata" for text-only PDFs.

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About Compress PDF

Make a PDF small enough to email, upload to a portal or store without wasting space. Choose how hard to compress: re-encode every page as an optimised image at the resolution and quality you pick, which works best for scans and image-heavy documents, or strip hidden metadata for a lossless clean-up. Compression runs on your own device, so even confidential files stay private.

How to use Compress PDF

  1. 1

    Add the PDF you want to shrink.

  2. 2

    Choose a mode: re-encode pages for the biggest savings, or strip metadata to keep the file identical on screen.

  3. 3

    If you re-encode, set the resolution (DPI) and image quality. Lower values make smaller files.

  4. 4

    Click Compress, compare the before and after size, and download the smaller PDF.

Why use this tool

  • Big reductions for scanned documents and photo-heavy PDFs, often several times smaller.
  • You control the trade-off between size and sharpness with DPI and quality settings.
  • A lossless metadata mode for text documents that are already compact.
  • See the original and compressed size side by side before you download.
  • No upload, no queue and no file size cap other than your device memory.

Frequently asked questions

Text-only PDFs are already efficient, so there is little to remove. Compression helps most when a PDF contains scans or large images.

In metadata mode, yes. In re-encode mode each page becomes an image, so text is no longer selectable or searchable. Keep the original if you need that.

Around 100–120 DPI with quality 0.6–0.7 keeps documents readable on screen while cutting most scanned files dramatically.

Yes. The file is processed in your browser and is never sent to a server, so nobody else can see it.

Yes. It runs in any modern mobile browser, although very large PDFs compress faster on a laptop or desktop.

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