Drop in the PDF you want to make smaller. The file is read locally in your browser, so contracts, invoices, medical forms, school papers, and scanned IDs are not uploaded to FyleTools or any third-party server.
Use higher quality for text-and-chart documents, medium quality for everyday email attachments, and stronger compression for scanned or image-heavy PDFs that need to fit under limits such as 10 MB, 5 MB, or 2 MB.
The WebAssembly processor rewrites the PDF and recompresses suitable embedded images. Compare the original and compressed sizes, then download a new file while your original PDF remains untouched.
The PDF stays on your device from start to finish. That matters when the document contains names, addresses, signatures, employee records, legal clauses, or private client material.
Compress PDFs for email, web portals, classroom uploads, accounting systems, and messenger apps without creating an account or accepting a watermark.
Text, links, page order, and vector artwork are preserved. Compression targets the parts that usually make PDFs huge: embedded photos, scans, duplicated streams, and oversized image data.
Portal uploads with hard caps: reduce school forms, visa packets, insurance documents, or government submissions that must be under 2 MB, 5 MB, or 10 MB.
Scanned paperwork: shrink multi-page scans from office scanners that save every page as a high-resolution color image.
Client delivery: send proposals, lookbooks, invoices, and reports by email without asking recipients to download a huge attachment.
Private documents: compress contracts, HR paperwork, medical forms, and financial PDFs without passing them through an upload-based service.
| Format | Description | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Scanned PDFs | Pages stored as full-page images, often 200-600 DPI | Largest reductions when scans are color or high resolution |
| Image-heavy PDFs | Catalogs, real estate packets, portfolios, and photo-rich reports | Balancing file size against visible image quality |
| Text documents | Reports, contracts, forms, and resumes with mostly selectable text | Smaller reductions while preserving crisp text |
| Portal-ready PDFs | Files prepared for email, CMS, LMS, or government upload limits | Hitting practical limits like 25 MB, 10 MB, 5 MB, or 2 MB |
If you need a strict target such as 2 MB, compress once at medium quality, check the output size, then move one level stronger only if needed.
For scanned forms, black-and-white or grayscale source scans compress far better than color scans; fix that at the scanner when possible.
Do not use the strongest setting for portfolios, product sheets, or design proofs unless small size matters more than image fidelity.
Keep the original PDF until you have opened the compressed version and confirmed that small text, signatures, stamps, and barcodes are still readable.
Most online compressors ask you to send the full document to their servers. FyleTools is built for cases where the file is private enough that upload avoidance is part of the value.
FyleTools loads your PDF into browser memory and uses a Rust/WebAssembly PDF engine to rewrite the file locally. The processor can recompress suitable image streams and rebuild the PDF output without sending bytes over the network. That local workflow is slower on very large files than a server farm, but it gives you a useful tradeoff: private compression on your own device with no upload queue and no retained copy.