Drop PDFs to compress to 500 KBAdd PDFs to compress to 500 KB
Fit a PDF under 500 KB with the gentlest settings that work.
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Your files never leave your deviceAbout this tool
A PDF to 500 KB compressor that keeps the text sharp
Each PDF is made at most 500 KB, 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 500 KB means for a PDF
500 KB is half a megabyte: room for a short scanned document at good quality. 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 306 KB, its pictures at 150 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.
Our scanned form kept 225 dpi at quality 85 and the report 300 dpi at quality 85; at the size a page shows on a screen, neither looks different from its original.
How a PDF reaches 500 KB
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 500 KB our phone photo PDF settled on 150 dpi at quality 85, and the scanned form on 225 dpi at quality 85.
500 KB here means 500,000 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 500 KB PDF
Some email systems and portals keep their limits near half a megabyte. If your PDF is much bigger than that, compare the result with the original on the page that matters most before you send it.
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 500 KB
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 good does a PDF look at 500 KB?
Good. Our scanned form kept 225 dpi at quality 85 and came to 457 KB; the phone photo PDF, 150 dpi at quality 85. Both look close to the original at the size the page shows them.
Why did a PDF with only text get smaller at 500 KB?
Compress PDF also packs the file itself more tightly: it stores the objects in compressed groups, merges duplicates and recompresses every stream. That alone took our 30-page text report from 87 KB to 23 KB.
Can a PDF be compressed under 500 KB more than once?
You can, but the second time gains next to nothing: the pictures are already at the resolution and quality that fit, and the file is already packed. If you need it smaller still, pick a lower limit and compress the original again.
Compress a PDF to a size
These pages open Compress PDF with the size already set.
Text stays sharp.Under 500 KB
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.