Compress a scanned PDF
This page explains compress a scanned PDF, what actually changes inside the file, and what to expect. The tool itself runs entirely on your device.
How to compress a scanned PDF
Three steps:
- Open the tool and drop your PDF in — or choose it from your device.
- Pick a setting. Balanced suits most documents.
- Download the result. Nothing was uploaded at any point.
What to expect
Savings depend on what the document holds. Scans and photo-heavy files commonly drop by 70–95%, because the images dominate and re-encoding them is very effective. A text-only report that was already compressed may hardly change — the tool reports the real figure rather than inflating it. Text and vector graphics are never touched, so they stay sharp at any zoom.
Practical tips
- Check the saving before you keep the result. If a file barely shrinks, it was already efficient and the original is the better copy.
- Scanned documents compress the most, because the whole page is a photograph. Text-only PDFs have little left to remove.
- Keep an original. Image re-encoding is lossy, so compressing the same file repeatedly degrades it each time.