Why PDFs get so big
Text takes almost no space in a PDF. Size comes from images: photos, scanned pages and high-resolution graphics. A single phone photo can be 3 to 5MB, and a scanned document is one large picture per page. Making a PDF smaller almost always means making its images smaller.
Method 1: Compress the PDF
Open the PDF compressor and drop in your file. Images inside the PDF are reduced to 150 dpi, which still looks sharp on screen and prints well on normal paper, and the PDF structure is cleaned up. Text stays real text and stays searchable.
If the result is not smaller, for example because the PDF contains only text, you get your original file back, so you never end up with a bigger file.
Method 2: Shrink the images before making the PDF
If you are making a PDF from photos, such as a scanned certificate or receipts photographed with a phone, shrink the photos first:
- Use Compress JPG and set Resize to Max 1920px (or Max 1280px for documents with large text).
- Then turn each photo into a PDF with JPG to PDF.
A photo of an A4 page at 1920 pixels is easy to read and usually well under 500KB.
How small can you go?
- Text documents (CVs, letters, reports made in Word): usually already small. If yours is large, it probably contains big images.
- Scanned documents: about 100 to 300KB per page after compression is typical.
- Brochures and photo-heavy PDFs: expect savings of 50 percent or more.
Tips for scanned documents
- Scan at 150 or 200 dpi, not 600. For forms and IDs that is plenty.
- Scan in greyscale instead of colour when colour is not needed.
- Crop away empty borders before saving.