Compress a PDF
Make photo-heavy PDFs smaller while keeping text sharp and selectable.
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Files stay on your device. How this works
How to compress a PDF
- Choose a PDF.
- Pick Light, Balanced or Strong compression.
- Select Compress PDF, compare the sizes, and download.
What to expect
- Results vary a lot. PDFs full of photos or scanned pages usually shrink the most. PDFs that are mostly text may barely change, or not at all.
- Only the photos inside the PDF are recompressed, and only when that makes them clearly smaller. Text stays sharp and selectable, and fonts, drawings and links aren't touched.
- Pages are never turned into images.
- If the result wouldn't be meaningfully smaller, you get your original file back, and we tell you so.
- Transparent images, CMYK print images and some special image types are left exactly as they are.
- Password-protected PDFs can't be opened. Digitally signed PDFs aren't changed, because compressing them would break the signature.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. Your browser does the work on your device. The PDF is not sent to Filecon's servers.
Why did my PDF barely get smaller?
Most of its size is probably text, fonts or vector graphics, which are already stored efficiently. Filecon only recompresses photos, so it can't shrink those parts without lowering quality.
Which setting should I use?
Balanced suits most documents. Use Strong when you need the smallest file, for example for an email limit, and check that the photos still look good enough. Use Light when image quality matters most.