How to reduce PDF file size

Fortunately for us, email services are no longer as restrictive as they used to be. They allow us to send files, even very large ones, without having to “break up” them or compress them in zip archives; this however is not a valid reason to “waste” and force our correspondents to download documents heavier than they should.

Think about all the PDFs you’ve received or sent in the last month – were they all high quality? But above all, were they all balanced? Was there an adequate relationship between their weight and the quality of the illustrations (or texts) they contained? I bet not, so let me suggest you a way to reduce PDF file size.

Of course I am not referring to who knows what magical solutions. I just want to introduce you to some online services, in my opinion extremely useful, which allow you to compress PDF documents in a very simple way and maximize the relationship between their weight and their visual quality. You won’t always get amazing results (you can’t work miracles with files that are already well optimized or that contain only text) but I assure you that they will come in handy on more than one occasion.

SmallPDF

SmallPDF is one of the best web services dedicated to PDF files. It allows not only to compress them, but also to convert them into other formats, divide them, merge them, decrypt them by removing the owner password and much more. It is completely free, requires no registration and has no upload limits (other than the one that limits the processing of a single file at a time). Furthermore, it should be noted that user privacy is respected with the automatic deletion, within a few hours, of all files uploaded to the service’s servers.

To reduce PDF file size with SmallPDF, connect to the site using the link I just provided and drag the document to be compressed into the browser window. Alternatively, if the drag and drop does not work, click the Choose file button and select the document “manually”.

So wait for the PDF to be loaded, processed and download the reduced version of the document on your PC by pressing the Download file button that appears at the bottom center.

iLovePDF

Now let’s move on to iLovePDF , one of the best alternatives to SmallPDF. This web service, as well as the one analyzed above, also allows you to work with PDF files in 360 degrees. In fact, it allows you to convert them into various file formats, rotate them, merge them, divide them, remove their owner passwords (those against modification and printing) and customize them by adding watermarks. The basic version of iLovePDF is completely free, does not require registration and has an upload limit of 200MB per file (also because it allows you to process only one document at a time). The protection of privacy is ensured by the fact that the files uploaded to the service server are automatically deleted within a few hours.

To reduce the weight of your PDFs with iLovePDF, connect to the site using the link I just provided and drag the document to be compressed into the browser window. Alternatively, if the drag-and-drop function does not work, click on the Select PDF file button and select the document “manually”.

Once upload is complete, select one of the three compression levels listed at the bottom of the page: Recommended compression to maintain a good balance between quality and weight of the file; Maximum compression to get a very “light” PDF at the expense of quality or Less compression to maintain the highest possible quality for the PDF using a lower compression ratio. Then click on the Compress PDF button and the optimized document will be automatically downloaded to your computer.

Online2PDF

If you need to reduce PDF file size in batch, try taking a look at Online2PDF which allows you to process up to 20 files at the same time and has an overall upload limit of 100MB (which drops to 50MB if you decide to compress only one document ). Also Online2PDF, like the two online services mentioned above, does not require registration in order to be used and protects the privacy of users by automatically deleting all the files that are uploaded to its servers.

To use it, connected to its home page and drag the PDFs to be compressed into the red box at the bottom (or click on the Select files button and select them “manually”). So make sure that in the drop-down menus Mode and Convert to there are selected, respectively, the options Convert files separately and PDF and click on the Compression tab located at the bottom left.

At this point, you have to select the desired quality level for the PDF to be obtained from the Quality of images drop-down menu (I advise you not to go below 70% if you do not want to degrade the image quality too much) drop-down menu Resolution of images and Color / black-and-white the 300 DPI and Color options are selected and you have to start the download of the compressed PDFs by clicking on the Convert button . Easier there this way?

If for one reason or another you prefer to compress your PDFs using offline applications, I recommend that you take a look at my tutorial on how to compress a PDF file in which I have suggested a couple of software for Windows and Mac OS X that allow you to reduce the size of documents in an extremely easy and fast way.