Compress a PDF file

SwiftPDFEdit's Compress PDF tool reduces the file size of a PDF on your own device, using either a lossless structural optimization or a stronger mode that re-renders pages as compressed JPEG images. You see the original and final sizes side by side before deciding to keep the result.

Almost everyone arrives here because of a limit: a 10 MB email attachment cap, an upload form that refuses anything over 5 MB, a court or government portal with its own ceiling, or a shared drive that has quietly filled up. Scans are the usual culprit — a phone-photographed contract can easily be 30 MB for ten pages of black text on white paper.

Three modes, and we are honest about what each one costs. Lossless rewrites the document's internal structure with object streams and drops redundant data; text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp, but the savings on an already-optimized file may be only a few percent. Strong re-renders every page to a JPEG at about 1.5× scale and quality 0.72, which typically cuts scanned documents by 50–90% but turns the page into a picture, so text is no longer selectable or searchable. Auto tries lossless first and only escalates to Strong if the saving is not worth having.

Choose by document type rather than by hope. A born-digital document — invoices from accounting software, a LaTeX report, an exported slide deck — is already efficiently encoded, and Lossless is the honest answer even when the saving is small. A scanned or photographed document carries enormous image payloads, and Strong is where the dramatic numbers come from. If the text in a scan needs to stay searchable, keep it lossless and reduce elsewhere: delete blank pages, or split the document.

If compression would not actually help, we say so rather than handing you a larger file — a real risk when re-encoding an already-compressed PDF. And because everything runs in your browser, there is no upload wait, no queue, and no server-side size cap; the practical limit is your device's memory.