“Your file exceeds the size limit.” PDFs bloat fast — a few phone-camera scans and you’re over an email or upload cap. Here is why it happens and how to fix it.
Why PDFs get big
Almost always, it’s the images inside. A scanned or photographed document stores full-resolution pictures of each page. Text-only PDFs, by contrast, are already tiny. So:
- Scanned / image-heavy PDF → big, and very compressible.
- Text/vector PDF → already small; little to gain.
Ways to shrink a PDF
- Recompress the images — re-render each page at a sensible resolution and JPEG quality. This is where the big savings come from for scans. The trade-off: pages become images, so text is no longer selectable.
- Remove unneeded pages — split out just the pages you need.
- Don’t over-scan — if you control the scanner, 150–200 DPI is plenty for documents.
Compress it in your browser — nothing uploaded
Contracts, IDs and financial statements are exactly the files you should not upload to a random site. This runs entirely on your device:
- Compress PDF — drag a quality slider and watch the size drop; best for scanned or image-heavy PDFs.
Also useful nearby:
- Merge PDF / Split PDF — combine or trim before compressing.
- Building a PDF from photos? See How to combine images into a PDF — and compress the images first for a smaller result.
What to expect
A scanned PDF can often drop to a fraction of its size at a quality that still prints and reads fine. A text PDF that’s already small won’t shrink much — and that’s normal.