Drop PDFs to compress to 1 MBAdd PDFs to compress to 1 MB
Fit a PDF under 1 MB with the gentlest settings that work.
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Your files never leave your deviceAbout this tool
A PDF to 1 MB compressor that keeps the text sharp
Each PDF is made at most 1 MB, with the gentlest settings that fit. A 3.2 MB scanned form came out at 457 KB, its pictures at 225 dpi at quality 85. If it can’t get that small at a readable quality, you get the smallest copy and a note. It stays on your device.
What 1 MB means for a PDF
1 MB is the usual limit for a mailbox attachment or a form that takes a few pages. a form scanned at 300 dpi (3.2 MB) comes out at 457 KB, its pictures at 225 dpi and quality 85; a phone photo on three A4 pages (5.2 MB) comes out at 625 KB, its pictures at 225 dpi and quality 85; a report with a logo, a chart, a photo and a signature (4.7 MB) comes out at 260 KB, its pictures at 300 dpi and quality 85.
At one megabyte our scan and phone photo PDF kept 225 and 225 dpi, so there is little to see on screen and not much on paper. Scans of a few pages and reports with photographs fit.
How a PDF reaches 1 MB
Compress PDF tries the gentlest settings first and goes down a step at a time until the file fits: pictures at up to 300 dpi and high quality, then lower. Text and drawings are never touched. For 1 MB our phone photo PDF settled on 225 dpi at quality 85, and the scanned form on 225 dpi at quality 85.
1 MB here means 1,000,000 bytes, the stricter way to read it, so a file that passes here passes a limit counted in KiB too. The floor is 72 dpi at quality 30: below that pictures stop being readable, so the PDF stays bigger than the limit and says so.
Before you send a 1 MB PDF
A PDF made of dozens of full-page photographs will not fit one megabyte at a good quality. For those, a bigger limit, or splitting the file, gives better results than squeezing the pictures.
How it works
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Step 1:Add your PDFs
Drop them in or choose them from your device. Each one shows its first page.
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Step 2:Compress to 1 MB
The limit is already set in the panel. Press Compress when you’re ready; nothing changes before that.
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Step 3:Check the size and save
Each PDF shows the size it reached. Save one file, or all of them as a .zip.
Questions, answered
How many pages fit in a 1 MB PDF?
That depends on what is on them. Pages of text take a few KB each: our 30-page text report is 23 KB. Scanned pages take far more, our two-page form came to 457 KB.
Will compressing a PDF to 1 MB lose colour?
No colours are changed, and colour profiles in the pictures are kept as they are. The phone photo PDF kept 225 dpi at quality 85, so colour and detail look as in the original.
Is it free to compress a PDF to 1 MB?
Yes, and there is no sign-in, no daily limit and no watermark. The work happens on your device, so it costs us nothing to run it as often as you like.
Compress a PDF to a size
These pages open Compress PDF with the size already set.
Text stays sharp.Under 1 MB
Compress by
We use the gentlest settings that fit. If a PDF can’t get that small at a quality you can read, you get the smallest we can make, and it says so.
What changes
Only pictures change: they come down to the size they’re shown at and are saved again. Text, vector drawings, links, bookmarks and form fields stay exactly as they are. The file is repacked too, so even a PDF without pictures can get smaller. Page thumbnails go, and so does the editing data some design apps keep inside a PDF: a PDF saved from Illustrator can’t be opened again as an editable Illustrator file.
PDFs with a password or a digital signature are left as they are: compressing them would remove the protection or break the signature.