Compress a PDF to 1 MB
A megabyte is the size an attachment has to be to travel without argument. Set it here and the document is brought under it on this device, with the quality that is left shown to you first.
- Comfortable for email, e-filing portals and shared drives.
- Nothing is uploaded. The work happens inside this browser tab.
- Already under a megabyte? The file is handed back untouched.
Why a megabyte is the practical ceiling
Mail servers, court e-filing systems and internal document portals tend to draw the line at a megabyte for a single attachment. It is not a hard technical limit so much as an old convention that everything has agreed to keep, and the result is that a file just over it bounces from places that never explain why.
Most documents are already under it. The ones that are not are usually scans, and usually colour scans, where a single page can carry several megabytes of photograph for a sheet of black text on white paper.
What a megabyte buys you
This is the most forgiving of the common limits. There is normally enough room to keep a scan at a resolution where the text is crisp, so the compression is doing arithmetic rather than damage. The tool still keeps the largest file that fits rather than the smallest it can make, precisely so that the room is spent on sharpness.
If the document is already small enough, nothing happens to it. The tool says it was already under the limit and hands back the original, which is a better copy than anything a pass could produce.
Sending it on afterwards
The saved file is a normal PDF that any reader will open. Because each page has been redrawn as a picture, the text inside it can no longer be selected or searched, so keep the original if you will need to quote from it later. For a document that has to stay searchable, compress a copy and send that.
Nothing about this page requires an account, and nothing you open here is stored. Close the tab and there is no record of the file anywhere, on this machine or ours.
How long does it take?
A few seconds for most documents. A long colour scan takes longer, since every page is redrawn once for each attempt the search makes.
Do you keep a copy of my document?
No, and there is nowhere for a copy to be kept. The file is never sent anywhere, and closing the tab discards everything.
Can I compress several files at once?
This page works on one document at a time. The Batch tool runs the same operation across a set of files.
Support and billing: support@gosmartpdf.com. Operated by Mrityunjay Kumar, India. Payments by Dodo Payments, our merchant of record.
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