Free tool
Compress PDF & Images
Make a scan, certificate, photo or signature small enough to upload. You see the exact size of every option before you pick one, and the file never leaves your device.
Drop a PDF or photo here
PDF, JPG, PNG or WebP — one at a time, up to 50 MB.
Your file never leaves this device. It is opened, rebuilt and saved entirely inside your browser — nothing is uploaded to us or to anyone else, and nothing is stored.
How it works
Choose your file
A PDF, or a JPG, PNG or WebP photo. Drop it on the page or pick it from your device — it is opened inside your browser and never sent to us.
See all three sizes
We work out every option before asking you to choose, so each one is labelled with the size it will really produce. No guessing, and no running it twice to find out.
Pick one and download
The file already exists by then, so downloading is instant. If nothing we try makes it smaller, we say so instead of handing back a bigger file.
What actually makes a PDF big
Almost always, pictures. A page of typed text is stored as a short list of instructions — which letter, which font, where on the page — and costs a few kilobytes. A scanned page is a photograph of a piece of paper, and a photograph at the resolution a phone camera produces can easily run to several megabytes on its own.
That is why the same tool behaves so differently on two files that look alike when you open them. There is nothing to squeeze out of a text document that is already a few hundred kilobytes, and a great deal to squeeze out of a four-page scan that is nine megabytes. The honest answer for the first kind of file is often “this is already as small as it sensibly goes”, and this tool says so rather than pretending.
Always open the compressed file and read it before you submit it anywhere. A certificate that has been shrunk too far can look fine at a glance and be unreadable where it matters, and a rejected application is a far bigger problem than a large file.
Common questions
Is my file uploaded to your server?
No. The whole thing happens inside your browser: the file is read from your device, rebuilt in your browser's memory, and saved straight back to your downloads. It is never sent to us, never stored, and never seen by anyone here. You can confirm this by disconnecting from the internet after the page has loaded — the compressor still works.
Can it compress photos as well as PDFs?
Yes. Drop in a JPG, PNG or WebP and you get the same three options with their real sizes. Photos are re-saved as JPEG, and the two stronger options also reduce the pixel dimensions, which is what makes the difference once the quality setting has done what it can. A picture is never enlarged, so a small signature stays its own size.
How much smaller will my file get?
It depends entirely on what is inside it. A scanned document — a photo of a page — is usually where the big savings are, often 70 to 90 per cent, because the picture can be re-rendered at a sensible resolution. A PDF you typed in Word is already small and stores its text as instructions rather than pixels; those usually shrink by a much smaller amount, and sometimes not at all.
Why did my file not get smaller?
Because it was already efficiently stored. This happens most often with short text documents that have no images in them. Rather than hand you a file that is the same size or bigger, the tool tells you plainly and leaves your original alone. A compressor that silently returns something larger is worse than useless when you are trying to meet an upload limit.
What is the difference between the three options?
For a PDF, “Good quality” only rebuilds the file structure. Nothing is re-drawn, so every letter stays selectable and searchable, and it is the right choice for a document you typed. “Recommended” and “Smallest file” re-render each page as an image at a lower resolution, which is the only thing that meaningfully shrinks a scan — but the words become part of the picture. For a photo, the first keeps every pixel and the other two reduce the dimensions as well as the quality.
Will the text still be selectable afterwards?
On “Good quality”, yes. On the other two, no — each page becomes an image, so you can read the words but not select or copy them. Each option says so on its own row before you choose, and the page repeats the warning once a picture-based option is selected.
I need my file under a specific size for an application form. What should I do?
You do not have to guess or run it twice: all three sizes are shown at once, so pick the largest one that still fits under the limit. Most government portals ask for somewhere between 100 KB and 2 MB for a supporting document. Always open the result and check it is still readable before you submit it.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, in any modern mobile browser. Very large files take longer and use a lot of memory on a phone, so there is a 50 MB limit and a 60 page limit. The page limit is lower than it might be because every option is measured on every page. If you hit either, split the document first.
Can it open a password-protected PDF?
No. A PDF locked with a password cannot be read without it, so the tool will tell you it could not open the file. Remove the password in whatever program created it and try again.
Need something else? Resize a photo or signature with the file converter, build a resume with the ATS resume builder, or browse the latest government jobs.