Make a PDF smaller
Shrink a PDF that is too big to send, or cut it into several files you can send separately. Either way it happens entirely in this browser — the file is never uploaded.
Options
Often much smaller for scanned text.
More settings
Your PDF
How this works
Everything stays in your browser. Your PDF is opened and rebuilt on your own device; this tool has no upload endpoint at all, and closing the tab drops the document and every download link it made. Password-protected PDFs are not supported. Every file it writes carries a fixed title and creator, with both dates pinned to the Unix epoch and none of the original's metadata, so the moment you made it is never recorded.
Smaller
Pages become pictures. A scanner or phone camera stores each page as a full-colour photo, often at 300 pixels per inch or more, which is why a scan is huge. This tool opens the PDF with PDF.js, redraws each page at 100 to 200 pixels per inch and saves it as a JPEG — usually a fraction of the size.
What that costs. Everything visible on a page is flattened into that picture; the text layer, form fields, links, attachments and object structure are not carried over, so the result is not searchable or selectable — though OCR software can still recover text from the pixels. Pages are drawn as they would print, so screen-only notes are left out and print-only content such as a watermark can appear.
The settings. “Smallest file” redraws at 100 pixels per inch and compresses at 50 out of 100, “Balanced” at 150 and 70, “Sharpest text” at 200 and 85; both numbers can be set exactly under “More settings”. Black and white drops the colour channels — often a large saving on scanned text, and the copy cannot get its colour back, though your original file is untouched. A PDF too large to redraw safely is refused rather than filling the browser's memory, and higher detail reaches that limit sooner.
When it will not help. A PDF made of real text and vector graphics is already compact, and turning it into pictures usually makes it larger. The before-and-after sizes are shown before anything downloads, so you can keep the original, or split it into several files instead.
Split
Pages are copied, not redrawn. Each page comes across down to the exact bytes of its content, so text stays searchable and fonts, vector graphics, page size, cropping and rotation are unchanged. 25 pages at 10 per file gives pages 1 to 10, 11 to 20, and 21 to 25 — the last file takes what is left. Everything in the next three paragraphs describes plain Split; choosing Both replaces all of it with redrawing, covered below.
What does not come along. Only the pages are copied, so anything describing the whole document is left behind: bookmarks, page labels (a file's first page is page 1, whatever the original called it), layers, attachments, embedded JavaScript, the document language, and the tagging screen readers use. A fillable form keeps its answers as they look but stops being fillable, and a digital signature does not survive.
Links are cut loose. A link pointing at a page outside its new file has that destination stripped first — otherwise the page it pointed at would be copied in with it, and a file you were told holds pages 1 to 10 would quietly contain page 40. A link that jumps by name breaks even inside its own file, because the list of names lives on the document, not on the pages.
Both — shrinking them too. Choosing Both redraws each file's pages as pictures instead of copying them, so everything under “Smaller” applies to them — searchable text most of all. The size limit then applies to each file rather than to the whole document, so a PDF too large to redraw in one go can often be split and shrunk. Choose “Split” instead to copy the pages untouched.
Limits. Everything a page uses is copied into every file that needs it, so a shared font or logo is stored once per file and the files together can add up to more than the original. A split is capped at 200 files at a time, because each one stays in the tab's memory until you leave the page. Copying a document is otherwise limited only by how much your browser can hold, which is tighter on a phone than on a laptop — a very large one can run the tab out of memory. An encrypted PDF cannot have its pages copied out — even one that opens without a password — but choosing “Both” often still works, because the pages are redrawn rather than copied.