Compress PDF to 1 MB

A 1 MB limit appears on many official and corporate upload forms: visa and residence applications, university admissions, job portals, insurance claims and tax or benefit portals. It is large enough for a complete document and small enough for the system to store millions of them. It also matters for email: a 1 MB attachment arrives quickly on any connection and never bumps into mailbox limits, while a 20 MB scan can be rejected or clog up someone's inbox.

At 1 MB most documents fit with no visible loss:

• Typed documents with images (reports, theses, presentations saved as PDF) usually fit in Recommended mode.
• Scans of up to 10 to 15 pages fit in color at 100 to 150 dpi.
• Scans of 20 to 40 pages fit in grayscale at around 100 dpi.
• Photo-heavy catalogues and portfolios fit once the photos are reduced to screen resolution.

Recommended works for the vast majority of PDFs. It recalculates the photos and scanned images to the resolution actually needed and leaves text, vector graphics, bookmarks, links and form fields as they are. The text stays searchable and selectable, which matters for job applications that are scanned by an applicant tracking system, and for any document someone will want to copy from.

Strong turns each page into an image. Use it for very long scans, or for PDFs that are large because of embedded fonts or complex drawings rather than photos. Strong mode also offers grayscale, which roughly divides the size of a scanned page by three when the document has no meaningful color. Keep in mind that the text in the result can no longer be selected or searched.

The tool searches for the right setting automatically. It first applies its strongest level to see whether 1 MB is reachable at all. Then it looks for the highest level between 50 dpi and 200 dpi that still fits and makes one more attempt between the last two levels, so the file uses as much of the 1 MB as possible for quality.

A PDF that is already under 1 MB is left untouched. If the target can't be reached in the chosen mode, you get the smallest file the mode can produce, marked in amber, with concrete next steps: switch to Strong mode with grayscale, delete pages you don't need or split the document into parts.

• Phone photos pasted into a document. Each can weigh several megabytes even when shown small. Recommended mode fixes this best.
• Scans at 300 to 600 dpi. Office scanners often default to print resolution. For on-screen reading, 150 dpi is plenty.
• Color scans of black-and-white paper. Grayscale in Strong mode helps a lot here.
• Fonts embedded in full. Some programs embed the whole font file instead of only the characters used. Recommended mode doesn't remove fonts; Strong mode removes the problem by turning pages into images.
• Repeated content. A PDF merged from many separate files can contain the same logo or font dozens of times. The repacking step in Recommended mode removes some of this duplication.

An application needs a 30-page annex: 22 typed pages with a few charts and 8 scanned, signed declarations. The merged PDF is 14 MB, and the portal allows 1 MB. In Recommended mode with a 1 MB target, the typed pages barely change, the charts stay vector, and the eight scanned pages drop to about 110 dpi. The result is around 0.9 MB and the text remains searchable. If the declarations were scanned at 600 dpi and the file still doesn't fit, compress them as a separate file in Strong mode with grayscale, provided the portal accepts more than one upload.

The compression runs on your own device, in your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded, which makes the tool suitable for passports, bank statements, contracts and medical records. There is no sign-up and no watermark, and the original file is kept unchanged.