Merge, compress, and shrink PDFs right here in your browser. Free, instant, and completely private — nothing is ever uploaded.
Perfect for email and upload limits. Pages are re-rendered as compressed images: layout and page count stay identical, but text is no longer selectable and fine detail is reduced.
One file at a time. The page count and original size appear immediately so you know what you are working with.
Use a preset — 5, 10, or 25 MB — or type any number, including decimals such as 4.5. Aim slightly below the real limit: mail servers measure the whole encoded message, not just your attachment.
Target mode tries a high-quality setting first and steps down only as far as it must. If you would rather decide yourself, switch on Manual quality instead and set JPEG quality and maximum page resolution directly.
Check the pages that matter — small print, stamps, signatures, fine tables. If anything is too soft, raise the target by a megabyte or two and run it again.
Each page is rendered exactly as a PDF reader would display it, then that rendering is saved as a JPEG image and placed on a page of the original dimensions. The document keeps its page count, page sizes, and visual layout. What it loses is everything that was structured data rather than appearance:
That trade is right for a scanned lease you need to email today, and wrong for a contract someone will search through next year. When accessibility or searchability matters, lossless compression or splitting the document is the better answer.
There is no formula that turns "10 MB" into a quality number, because it depends on what is on the pages. Instead, the tool works through a ladder of presets ordered from best to smallest — each one a pairing of maximum page resolution and JPEG quality — and performs a binary search over it, re-rendering the document at each step it tests.
The result is the highest-quality preset on the ladder that still lands under your target, usually found in three or four passes rather than by testing every rung. If even the smallest preset overshoots, you get that smallest version anyway, clearly labelled, so you can decide whether to split the document instead.
Attachment limits are quoted for the encoded message, and email encoding inflates a binary file by roughly a third. A "25 MB limit" therefore accepts an attachment of around 18 MB in practice. The right-hand column is the target to set here.
| Where you are sending it | Stated limit | Safe target |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | 25 MB | 18 MB |
| Outlook.com | 20 MB | 14 MB |
| Microsoft 365 / Exchange (default) | 25–35 MB | 18 MB |
| iCloud Mail | 20 MB | 14 MB |
| Corporate mail servers (typical) | 10 MB | 7 MB |
| Job application portals | 2–5 MB | 2 MB |
| Government and tender portals | 5–10 MB | 4 MB |
Limits change and administrators override defaults, so treat these as starting points rather than guarantees. When a portal states a limit, target roughly 20% below it.
Manual mode exposes the two levers that matter. Resolution is the stronger of the two: halving it removes about three quarters of the pixels, while dropping JPEG quality from 80 to 60 typically saves a third.
| Setting | Best for | What suffers |
|---|---|---|
| 2000–2400 px · quality 85 | Archival scans, anything to be reprinted | Very little; savings are modest |
| 1600 px · quality 75 | The everyday default — email and portals | Slight softening of very small type |
| 1200 px · quality 65 | Screen reading and quick review | Footnotes and 6pt text get fuzzy |
| 800–1000 px · quality 45 | Hard limits you cannot negotiate | Visible artefacts; body text still legible |
A page rendered at 1600 px across A4 works out to roughly 195 DPI — fine on screen, acceptable on an office printer, short of the 300 DPI that commercial printing expects. If the document will be printed professionally, keep the original and send it as a link.
Try lossless compression first. It reclaims structural waste without touching a single pixel.
Yes. Pages are rendered and re-encoded inside your browser tab using your device's own graphics pipeline. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or transmitted, and the data is discarded when you close the tab.
Because each page has been replaced by an image of itself. That is how the large savings are achieved. If you need selectable text, use the lossless compressor instead, or keep the original alongside the shrunken copy.
The tool reached the smallest preset it has and reports that clearly. Options: split the document into two files, remove pages you do not need, or crop large blank margins before shrinking. For scans, converting to greyscale in your scanner software before re-scanning also helps a great deal.
Roughly a second per page per pass on a modern laptop, and target mode makes three or four passes. A 40-page document is usually done in well under a minute; a 300-page one is worth starting and leaving alone.
Yes — that is where it performs best. Scans are already images, so re-rendering them at a sensible resolution often cuts 80–95% of the file size with little visible difference on screen.
No. Every page keeps its position and dimensions. Only the content of each page is replaced with a rendered image.
Not from the shrunken file — the discarded detail is gone. Always keep the original until you have checked the output, and download the result under a new name (the tool adds a suffix for exactly this reason).