About This Tool
This compressor shrinks large PDFs — typically scans and photo-heavy documents — so they fit email attachment limits and the 1–5 MB caps common on government and application portals. When you select a file, every page previews instantly; after compressing, a side-by-side quality comparison shows page 1 before and after, so you can judge the result before relying on it. All processing happens in your browser; the file is never uploaded.
What to Expect
- Scanned documents: reductions of 60–90% are typical, because most scans carry far more resolution than a reader ever needs.
- Text-only PDFs (exported from Word, etc.) are already tiny and may come out larger — the tool will tell you instead of giving you a worse file.
- Trade-off: because pages are converted to images, selectable and searchable text is not preserved in the compressed copy. Always keep your original as the archive version and use the compressed copy for transmission — the same two-copy habit we recommend in our filing checklist.
Still Too Big?
If even the compressed file exceeds a portal limit, the problem is usually upstream: rescan the source documents at 200 dpi in black and white rather than compressing a 600 dpi colour scan. Our guide on reducing PDF file size covers the scan settings that prevent oversized files in the first place. Very long documents can also be split into parts at logical boundaries.