PDF minifier — rebuilds pages as compressed images
Shrink a PDF that is large because its pages are images — scans, photographed documents, image-heavy exports. Each page is re-rendered at the detail you choose and JPEG-compressed into a new PDF, entirely in this browser — the file is never uploaded.
Options
Drops all color — often noticeably smaller for scanned text documents.
Document
How PDF minifying works
Everything stays in your browser. The PDF is opened with PDF.js, each page renders to a canvas, and a new PDF is assembled locally. Nothing is uploaded — this tool has no upload endpoint at all — and closing the tab drops the loaded document and the generated download URL.
Why image-heavy PDFs are huge. Scanners and phone cameras store each page as a full-color photo, often at 300 or more pixels per inch and sometimes with little or no compression. A few dozen pages like that add up fast. Minifying re-renders each page at 100–200 pixels per inch and stores it as a JPEG, which is usually a fraction of the size.
The output is rasterized. Every page of the minified file is a single JPEG image. Anything visible on the page — including highlights, stamps, and filled-in form answers — is flattened into that image, while the text layer, interactive form fields, links, attachments, and the original object structure are dropped, so the result is not searchable or selectable — though OCR software can still recover text from the visible pixels. Pages are rendered the way they would print, so notes marked as screen-only are left out and print-only content such as watermarks can appear. Document metadata is replaced with a fixed stub whose dates are pinned to the Unix epoch, so the moment you exported the file is never recorded.
Choosing detail and quality. Page detail sets the pixel density each page is re-rendered at — Compact uses 100 pixels per inch, Standard 150, and Sharp 200. Image quality sets how aggressively those pixels are JPEG-compressed. Higher values keep small text sharper and make larger files. Grayscale drops the color channels entirely, which often helps scanned text documents. Very large PDFs may be blocked to avoid exhausting browser memory — higher detail hits that limit sooner.
When minifying won't help. A PDF made of real text and vector graphics is already compact, and rasterizing it usually makes it larger. The before-and-after sizes are always shown first, so when minifying doesn't pay off, keep the original. Password-protected PDFs are not supported.