Email says attachment too large. A job portal refuses your file. Sound familiar? Most of the time the problem is not the number of pages. It is the pictures inside them, and you can fix it in under a minute with Compress PDF.
Why is my PDF so big?
Text is tiny. A page of plain text weighs almost nothing. What makes a PDF heavy is images: scanned pages, phone photos, screenshots and slides exported with high-resolution pictures. A ten-page scan can easily reach 30 MB because every page is a full-size photograph.
Three ways to make a PDF smaller
Light compression cleans out extra data hiding in the file, such as unused document properties. Your text stays selectable and nothing changes visually, but the saving is usually small.
Strong compression re-saves every page as a compressed picture. This is where the big savings come from, often shrinking a scan by more than half. The trade-off is that you can no longer select or search the text.
Extreme compression uses lower resolution and stronger compression for the smallest possible file. Text can look softer, so use it only when an upload limit forces you to.
Which level should I pick?
- Scan or photo-heavy file for an email: choose Strong.
- Contract or report where people must copy text: start with Light.
- Strict limit such as 1 MB on a government form: try Extreme, then zoom in to check readability.
Step by step
- Open Compress PDF and add your file.
- Choose a compression level.
- Press Compress PDF and compare the size before and after.
- Download the result and scroll through it once before sending.
More ways to reduce size
If only a few pages matter, use Extract Pages to keep just those. Remove pages you do not need with Remove Pages, and clean hidden properties with Remove Metadata. Combining files? Do the merge first with Merge PDF, then compress the final file once.
A quick tip
Always keep your original. Compress a copy, open it and check that signatures, small print and stamps are still readable before you send it.