How to compress a PDF without losing quality

A PDF that's “too large to upload” is almost always large because of pictures. Text is tiny: a hundred pages of plain text is often under 500 KB. A single phone photo of a page, on the other hand, can be 3–5 MB. So compression is really about images.

Why your PDF is big

• Scanned pages are stored as photos — every page is an image.
• Phone photos turned into PDFs keep their full 12-megapixel resolution, far more than a screen or printer needs.
• Presentations exported to PDF often embed full-size stock photos.

Picking a level

Our Compress PDF tool re-encodes the images inside the file while leaving text and vector graphics untouched, so text stays razor-sharp and selectable.

• Light — almost invisible changes; good for documents you'll print.
• Recommended — the best balance for email and most portals.
• Strong — noticeably smaller; photos look softer when zoomed in.
• Extreme — rebuilds each page as a compact image. Best for scans that must fit a strict limit, but text becomes non-selectable.

Hitting an exact limit

Government and job portals often cap uploads at 100 KB, 200 KB or 1 MB. The Compress PDF to 200 KB tool searches for the highest quality that still fits. If a 10-page scan can't fit even at low quality, it tells you rather than producing an unreadable file. Two tricks help: convert the scan to black and white first, and remove pages the portal doesn't need.

When compression won't help

If your PDF is mostly text and already small, there's little to squeeze out. We'll keep your original rather than give you a “compressed” file that's larger — which happens more often with other tools than you'd think.