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Get a PDF Under 500 KB

Half a megabyte is the usual ceiling for a bundle of documents — a set of certificates, an application with its annexures — and a bundle scanned on a phone is often five times that. This page works down through every page of your PDF until the whole file is under 500,000 bytes.

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Nothing uploadedNo sign-upNo watermarkHow that works

How to get a PDF under 500 KB

  1. Tap Choose your document and pick the PDF, however many pages it runs to.
  2. The target is already 500 KB. Tap Compress to 500 KB.
  3. Let it run — a twenty-page scan takes a little while on a phone.
  4. Check the size it reached, then save the smaller copy.

A long scan is the easiest thing to shrink

A twenty-page phone scan is twenty full-page photographs, and photographs are exactly what this tool re-encodes. Files like that routinely lose most of their weight without any visible harm, because a phone camera captures far more detail than a printed page contains and the surplus is pure cost. Five hundred kilobytes across twenty pages is twenty-five each, which is comfortable for typed text.

Each page is worked on separately and keeps whichever version came out smaller, the new one or the one it already had. That stops an already tiny page — a blank sheet, a simple line drawing — from growing while the rest of the document shrinks.

The parts of your file it will not touch

Some things inside a PDF are left alone deliberately. Transparency masks are skipped, because an artefact in that channel shows up as a visible halo around a logo. Images stored in the fax format that black-and-white scanners produce are skipped, because re-encoding them as photographs makes them bigger. Anything the browser cannot decode safely is copied across byte for byte instead of guessed at.

Each of those is reported when the job finishes, so a file that shrank less than you expected arrives with its reason attached, rather than leaving you wondering whether you pressed the wrong button.

Questions

Will 500 KB be small enough to email?
Comfortably — attachment limits are measured in megabytes, so half of one clears every mail provider. This size is normally asked for by upload forms rather than by email.
How long does a twenty-page scan take?
A few seconds on a laptop, and up to a minute on a mid-range phone, because every page has to be decoded and re-encoded by your own device. The progress bar moves page by page and you can stop it at any point.
Does it work on a PDF made of screenshots?
It depends how the screenshots were stored. Photographic ones are re-encoded as usual; screenshots saved losslessly inside the PDF are left alone, so a file made entirely of those may barely change. The first line of the result says how many of its images could be worked on.
Is anything kept after I close the tab?
No. The file is held in memory while you work on it, and nothing is written to a server or into your browser storage. Closing the tab is all the clearing up there is to do.

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