Compress a PDF for email without losing quality

Most email providers cap attachments around 20–25 MB, but a PDF full of scanned pages or high-res photos can easily blow past that. Here's why PDFs balloon in size, and how to bring them back down.

Why PDFs get so big

The usual culprit is embedded images at far higher resolution than needed for screen viewing — a scanned page saved at 600 DPI, for instance, is massive overkill for something someone will read on a laptop. Fonts, unused metadata and uncompressed streams add up too.

How our Compress PDF tool helps

Our Compress PDF tool re-renders each page and re-encodes it at a quality level you choose — Light, Recommended, or Maximum — right in your browser. Recommended is a good default: it typically cuts file size significantly while keeping text and images legible.

When to use which level

Use Light for documents with small text or fine diagrams you need to keep crisp. Recommended works for most everyday PDFs. Maximum is best for scans and photo-heavy files where the absolute smallest size matters more than pixel-perfect detail.

One trade-off worth knowing: because compression works by turning each page into an optimized image, any selectable text in the original won't be selectable in the compressed version. Keep your original file if you need that later.