Compress PDF

How PDF compression works

A PDF is a container. Text and vector drawings are small; what makes most PDFs large is embedded images – scanned pages, photos and screenshots – plus duplicated fonts and unused objects left over from editing. Fileopia looks inside your PDF, measures every embedded image and then applies the level you choose. Before you even click, each level card shows an estimated output size so you can pick the trade-off that suits you.

• Recommended – re-encodes oversized photos as efficient JPEGs at a sensible resolution, removes unused objects and rewrites the file compactly. Text and vector graphics are untouched, so they stay perfectly sharp and searchable.
• Extreme – renders every page as an image at reduced resolution. This gives the smallest possible file, ideal for e-mail limits and upload portals, but text is no longer selectable.
• Custom settings – open *Custom settings* to set image resolution (72–300 DPI), JPEG quality (30–90%) and convert images and scanned pages to grayscale.
• Less – a lossless rebuild. Nothing visual changes; you gain space only from cleaning up the file structure. Useful for documents where every pixel matters.

If a result would be bigger than your original – which happens with files that are already optimised – Fileopia keeps the original and tells you, so you never download a worse file.

Need an exact size such as 100 KB or 1 MB?

Government forms, job portals and university applications often enforce a hard limit. Use the target-size tools – Compress PDF to 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB or any size in KB. They try progressively stronger settings and stop as soon as the file fits, keeping as much quality as possible.

Will compression affect fonts or quality?

At the Recommended and Less levels fonts are never rasterised, so text prints and zooms exactly as before. Photos are resampled to a resolution that still looks sharp on screen and in normal office printing. Only Extreme converts pages to images; choose it when size matters more than editability.

For scanned documents – which are just images already – Recommended usually gives the biggest gains with almost no visible difference, often reducing a 10 MB scan to 1–2 MB.

Common uses

• CVs and résumés – many applicant tracking systems cap uploads at 2 MB or less; a compressed CV uploads instantly and keeps its text searchable for keyword matching.
• Posters and brochures – design exports with full-resolution photos can be 50 MB or more; Recommended brings them down to e-mail size.
• Scanned paperwork – bank statements, invoices and ID copies for online forms.
• Team sharing – smaller files sync faster to shared drives and chat apps, and because nothing is uploaded here, confidential team documents stay private.

Tips for the smallest PDF

• Remove pages you don’t need first with Delete PDF Pages.
• Colour scans of black-and-white text? Tick *Convert to grayscale* in Custom settings – it often saves another 20–40%.
• Combine several documents with Merge PDF and compress once, rather than compressing each part.

Compression levels compared

Savings depend entirely on what is inside the PDF. A file that is mostly typed text may only shrink by a few per cent, because there is little to remove; a phone-camera scan can shrink by ten times or more.

Why compress in the browser instead of online?

Online compressors are convenient, but every one of them requires you to send the file to a server you don’t control, often with retention periods measured in hours. Many also limit free users – Sejda’s free web plan, for example, allows 3 tasks per hour and files up to 50 MB. Fileopia has none of those constraints: the compression engine is downloaded once as part of this page and then runs on your processor. Large files are limited only by your device’s memory, and you can compress as many documents as you like, one after another, without waiting or creating an account.

It is also faster for big files on slow connections – there is no 30 MB upload followed by a 30 MB download, just local processing.

Compression is also repeatable: try Recommended, compare the result with the original side by side, and if you need it smaller, run Extreme on the original – each attempt takes seconds.