Why compress a PDF to 500 KB?
Most application portals, supporting documents. The tool above is pre-set to 500 KB — drop your PDF, click "Compress now", and download. Everything happens in your browser.
How it works
We use pdf.js to rasterize each page of your PDF to a JPEG image, then pdf-lib to rebuild a new PDF with those JPEG-encoded pages. The JPEG quality is tuned to bring the total under 500 KB.
This is the same approach commercial PDF compressors use. The difference: we run it client-side, so your PDF is never sent to a server.
What works well
- Scanned documents — passport pages, certificates, ID cards, declarations
- Photographed documents — receipts, handwritten notes, signed forms
- Multi-page documents where each page is image-based
What to watch for
- The output PDF is image-based — text becomes part of the page image (not selectable). For most submission use cases this is fine.
- For very tight targets on very large source PDFs, you may see visible quality loss. Try a slightly larger target if quality matters more than size.