Hit the Exact Size a Portal Demands
Upload forms love hard limits: a government e-filing that rejects anything over 2 MB, a job site capped at 1 MB per attachment, an email gateway that bounces files above 5 MB. Ordinary compressors give you fixed quality presets and leave you guessing whether the result will squeak under the cap. This tool flips that around — you type the number you must hit, and it works toward it for you.
Because the whole process runs in your browser, the document you're trying to upload somewhere sensitive never gets uploaded somewhere else first.
How Target-Size Compression Works
The tool renders each page to an image and re-encodes it as an optimized JPEG, then rebuilds the PDF — the same proven technique behind heavy scan compression. To meet your target it runs this as an adaptive loop: a first pass at high resolution and quality, and if the result is still over your limit, up to two further passes at progressively lower resolution and JPEG quality. The loop is deliberately capped at three passes so the tab never freezes, and it returns the smallest version it produced, telling you whether your target was met.
One honest trade-off applies, as with any strong compression: the output is image-based, so its text is no longer selectable. Keep your original as the editable master and use the compressed copy for the upload.
Picking a Sensible Target
Match the number to the limit you were given, with a little headroom — aim for 1.9 MB if the cap is 2 MB. Going extremely low (well under 1 MB) on a text-heavy or many-page document forces aggressive quality loss; if readability suffers, raise the target slightly. For documents that must stay crisp for printing, prefer the regular Compress tool's Light preset instead.