A PDF size reducer without the jargon
Most PDF size reducer tools ask questions nobody can answer: a DPI number, a JPEG quality from 1 to 100, a preset named after a printing standard. This one asks a single thing, how hard to squeeze, and gives you three answers written in terms of what you will see on the page.
Drop PDFs onto the window, or click Add PDFs. Choose a strength in the side pane, labeled How hard to squeeze, and press Compress. When the run ends, every row shows a percentage such as 38% smaller, or no change if a file had nothing left to give, and the pane shows the total space saved across the batch.
Click any file to see its first page, its page count and its size now, then its size after once it has been compressed. Thumbnails of the pages sit underneath, so you can confirm you dropped the right document before you send it anywhere.
How to shrink a PDF in three steps
Save offers Beside the originals, Into a folder…, or Replace the originals. The first is the default, so your source files stay untouched unless you deliberately ask otherwise.
- Add the files: drag them in, or use Add PDFs. Anything that is not a PDF is turned away.
- Pick Gentle for documents you are archiving, Smaller for everyday use, or Smallest for an attachment that has to get through.
- Choose where the results go under Save, then press Compress.
Why some PDFs shrink a lot and others barely move
Almost all of the weight in a large PDF comes from pictures: photos, scanned pages, screenshots pasted into a report. Those are what this app works on. Each picture is re-encoded at the strength you chose and, on the two stronger settings, scaled down if it is wider or taller than it needs to be. A picture is only swapped when the new copy is actually smaller.
Text, fonts and line art are not converted into images, so lettering keeps its sharp edges however far you zoom in. Around them, the file is tidied without loss: objects that nothing on any page refers to are dropped, and content streams that were stored uncompressed are packed.
That is why a slide deck exported with full-resolution photos might lose most of its size, while a text-only contract that is already lean comes back marked no change. Nothing is forced smaller at the cost of breaking it.
Compress multiple PDF files at once
The strength you pick applies to every file in the queue. Drop a whole folder's worth of invoices or scanned forms, press Compress once, and walk away. A file that fails, for example one that is password protected, is marked with the reason and the rest of the batch carries on.
Each finished copy is named after its source with (smaller) added, so report.pdf sits next to report (smaller).pdf and it is obvious which is which.
