Compress PDF to 1 MB.
Need a PDF under 1 MB for a form or email? Drop it in and we downsample the images to the sharpest resolution that fits, keeping your text as real text. Uploaded privately and deleted after 1 hour. No watermark, no signup.
On-target
Auto-tunes image DPI
Text-safe
Only images shrink
Private
Deleted after 1 hour
How it works
- 01
Add your PDF
Drop in a .pdf, or click to browse. It is uploaded privately over TLS and deleted after 1 hour.
- 02
We find the sharpest images that fit
Ghostscript rewrites the PDF with its images at 220 dpi, then 180, 150 and lower, and keeps the first version at or under 1 MB. Text and vector drawings are not downsampled.
- 03
Download it
Grab the compressed PDF, ready for any form, portal or email with a 1 MB limit.
Other targets: 100 KB · 200 KB · 300 KB · 500 KB · 1 MB · 2 MB · 5 MB · 10 MB · any size · just make it smaller.
What a 1 MB target does to real PDFs
We ran three kinds of PDF through the same engine this page uses, with a 1 MB target.
- A 6 page scan with photo pages at 300 dpi, 3.48 MB: 789 KB, with the images at 150 dpi.
- A 6 page report with text and photos, 4.12 MB: 360 KB, photos kept at 220 dpi, the highest step, because the target was easy to meet.
- A 20 page vector drawing with no photos, 4.42 MB: 3.56 MB, target missed, because there were no images to shrink.
Got more room? The same scan at the 2 MB target keeps its images at 180 dpi. Need it smaller still? Try 500 KB.
What 1 MB holds in a PDF
1 MB is 1,048,576 bytes. Page images are re-encoded from 220 dpi down to 32 dpi until one fits.
| Pages | Per page |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1.00 MB |
| 2 | 512 KB |
| 5 | 205 KB |
| 10 | 102 KB |
| 20 | 51.2 KB |
| 50 | 20.5 KB |
| 100 | 10.2 KB |
| 200 | 5.1 KB |
| 500 | 2.0 KB |
| Scan | 1 page | 10 pages | 50 pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| 220 dpi | 1.79 | 0.18 | 0.036 |
| 150 dpi | 3.85 | 0.39 | 0.077 |
| 100 dpi | 8.68 | 0.87 | 0.17 |
| 64 dpi | 21.20 | 2.12 | 0.42 |
| 32 dpi | 84.64 | 8.46 | 1.69 |
- Still over 1 MB at 32 dpi: you get the smallest version, marked over.
Common questions
Why 1 MB?+
Plenty of upload forms, job portals and email threads cap PDFs at 1 MB. This gets a scanned or photo heavy PDF under that limit in one step.
How exact is 1 MB?+
The target is 1,048,576 bytes, which is 1 MB as Windows counts it. Some upload forms count 1 MB as 1,000,000 bytes instead. If a portal still says the file is too big, use the 500 KB target, which leaves room under either count.
Will my text stay readable?+
Yes. Only images are downsampled. In our tests the text stayed real, selectable text with every character intact, and links and bookmarks were kept.
What happens to form fields?+
A filled form field is flattened: its value stays visible on the page as text but can no longer be edited. Compress the PDF before you fill in or sign it.
What if it can't reach 1 MB?+
Then the PDF has little image data to shrink. A 20 page vector drawing of 4.42 MB came down only to 3.56 MB. You get the smallest version we made, never a broken file, and the page tells you the target was missed.
Is my PDF private, and is there a watermark?+
It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, compressed on our server, and both the upload and the result are deleted after 1 hour. No account and no watermark.
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