How to Compress a PDF for Email and Upload Limits
A PDF that's too large to email or upload is one of the most common document headaches. Gmail and Outlook cap attachments at around 20–25 MB, and many government, university and job portals accept only 1–5 MB. The good news: most oversized PDFs can be shrunk dramatically.
Why is my PDF so large?
Text barely takes any space — a 100-page text-only document is often under 1 MB. Large PDFs are almost always large because of images: scanned pages, phone photos of documents, or high-resolution pictures embedded in reports. A single page scanned at 600 dpi in colour can be several megabytes on its own.
Compress the PDF
Open Compress PDF, choose your file and pick a level:
- Balanced — the recommended starting point; documents remain easy to read.
- Strong — the smallest file, good for meeting strict upload limits.
- Light — keeps more detail, for documents you'll print.
Know the trade-off
EasyToConvert compresses PDFs in your browser by re-rendering each page as a compressed image. That's very effective for scans and photo-heavy files — reductions of 50–90% are common — but text in the result can no longer be selected or searched. Keep your original if you need to copy text from it later.
Text-only PDFs are already compact, so compressing them may not help. In that case the tool tells you and gives back your original rather than a bigger file.
Still too big? Split it
If one document must stay under a hard limit and is still too large, use Split PDF to break it into parts (for example pages 1-10 and 11-20) and send or upload them separately.
Prevent large PDFs in the first place
- Scan documents at 150–200 dpi; 300 dpi is only needed for professional printing.
- Scan in greyscale unless colour matters.
- Resize and compress photos before inserting them into documents.