How to compress a PDF without losing more quality than needed
Compress PDF makes a document lighter, mainly by recompressing its images. You pick one of three levels depending on what matters more: a small file or a sharp one.
You will need it when a job portal, a government website or your email provider rejects a file for being too large, which is almost always down to scanned pages or high-resolution photos.
Step by step
- Upload one or more PDFs with Choose PDF or by dragging them in.
- Under Compression quality, choose Smallest size, Balanced or Best quality.
- Run the compression and compare the result with View original.
- Download the PDF; if you uploaded several, they come together in a ZIP.
Which level to choose
Balanced is the default and is usually enough for email without a visible difference on screen. Smallest size squeezes images harder, which helps with very low upload limits, but check that photos and stamps are still legible. Best quality reduces less and is the better choice if the document will be printed.
Text and vector graphics are already compact, so a PDF exported from Word with few images will barely shrink. The biggest savings come from scans and slide decks full of photos.
When the file does not get smaller
If the original was already optimised, there may be nothing to gain, and you can simply keep the original. Other ways to get under a limit are deleting pages you do not need or splitting the document.
Jobs accept up to 50 MB and 50 pages per PDF. In a batch, the same settings are applied to every file.
Frequently asked questions
- How much smaller will my PDF get?
- It depends on the content. Scans and photo-heavy PDFs shrink a lot; text-only files shrink little or not at all.
- Will I lose quality?
- Images are recompressed, so some detail is lost. Best quality keeps that loss to a minimum.
- Can I compress several PDFs at once?
- Yes. Upload them all, choose the level and download them together as a ZIP.
- Is the text still selectable?
- Yes. Compression works on the images; text is not converted into pictures.
- Is it free?
- Yes, with ads and no sign-up. Naiara Plus removes the ads.