A PDF full of scanned pages or high-res photos can easily hit 20-30MB, well past what most email inboxes or college upload portals will accept. This tool shrinks it right in your browser: drag a slider, click compress, done.
Text takes up almost no space in a PDF. It's stored as vector instructions, not pixels. The bulk usually comes from embedded images: a scanned page, a screenshot, a photo dropped in at full camera resolution.
Compression works by re-encoding those images at a lower quality and tidying up the file's internal structure. Drop the slider a bit and you can often cut file size by half or more without anyone noticing at normal reading zoom.
Resumes, contracts, plain reports? Push the slider low. Text isn't touched by this process at all, so there's nothing to lose.
Photo-heavy PDFs and detailed diagrams need a gentler touch. Keep quality higher there, or fine detail starts to look mushy. It only takes a few seconds to try a couple of settings and compare.
No. Text in a PDF is vector data, not an image, so compression (which only targets embedded pictures) leaves it completely sharp.
Not an artificial one. Everything runs on your own device using your browser's memory, so a very large file (several hundred MB) might just take a bit longer on an older laptop or phone.
It never leaves your browser tab. Compression happens locally using JavaScript running on your device.
Unlock it first using the Unlock PDF tool, compress it, then re-lock it afterward if you still need the password.