How to Compress PDF Files to Share/Upload

There may be times when you need to compress a PDF file in order to be able to email it to one or more people or if you intend to  upload it to a website. Although PDFs are the most popular supported standards to deliver documents online, they tend to be heavy when they are loaded with tons of great looking pictures and graphics, making it necessary for us to reduce its size without losing its quality. There are plenty of ways in which this can be done and in this post, we are going to take a look at some of the popular methods available.

Six Methods to Compress PDF Files

1.Using Free Online Compression Tools

There are tons of free online compression tools that can reduce the size of your PDF file. You can simply type” free online PDF compression tools” in Google to find one and you’ll usually find many big sites recommending several tools. You’ll still need to watch out for things like tools adding their own watermarks into your documents. How this works is, your files will need to be uploaded to the site for shrinking and once its complete, you can download it directly from the site, or you may be emailed the document. Make sure you open up the file and double check that nothing is broken and there are no errors. Most sites will delete your document from their servers within a few hours. If you are concerned about the security of your documents in the cloud, or if you have a large file, but a slow internet connection, (it might take forever!) you can try other options.

2.Using Adobe Acrobat

If you own an expensive program like Adobe Acrobat, you can use it to reduce the file size. If you are using Adobe Acrobat X, simply open up the document in the tool, go to File > Save As > Optimized PDF to get the job done. In Acrobat 9, you will find this command when you click on Document>Reduce PDF Size.

3. Using a Converter Tool Like PDF Compressor

You can always download a number of free PDF converter tools to compress them from your PC. There are a number of such programs that come recommended by top sites, but most of them come bundled with a load of trouble. CutePDF has a number of unwanted toolbars it wants to add on, while PrimoPDF had an unwanted PUP malware in it. PDF Compressor from the .net site was perfect on all counts except that it added a watermark to the compressed file. You could actually end up spending a lot of time on finding the right programs and that’s certainly not the right way to go about doing something as simple as compressing a PDF file. So while this is not my recommended option, if you still prefer to go with it, here’s another tool that worked okay. It also goes by the name of PDF Compressor and it managed to bring down my 103.17 MB file to 87.01 MB, not much compared to others but still better than all the previous tools I tried.

1. If you don’t have the tool, download it from here.

2. Run the EXE file and launch the tool.

3. Drag and drop the PDF file you want to compress. Or click Add Files, navigate to the folder where you have the PDF copy, select it, and click Open.

4. Hit the Start Compression button.

Wait for a few minutes for the process to complete. The program will ask if you want to see the file in the Output folder. By all means go ahead and click it.

The tool’s dashboard displays all the details of the PDF compressed for future reference.

4. Using PC Compression Tools

Both Windows and Mac systems allow you to compress files into ZIP files, although this reduction may not be too big. In Windows 8, right-click on the file you want reduced and choose Send to->Compressed (zipped ) folder.

5. Using Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat

Here’s another method to compress a PDF in Adobe. Save the PDF you want to reduce as a Word doc. To do that, first open the file in Adobe Acrobat, then go to File->Save as Other->Microsoft Word. Now right-click the PDF in Word and select Convert to Adobe PDF. This tends to compress PDF file size quite considerably.

6. Using Browser Extensions

You’ll also find PDF compressors available in the form of browser extensions. The PDF Compressor from Smallpdf.com is one such example of a Chrome extension that should work for you.

I hope that one of the methods listed above helped you to compress a PDF file according to your needs. If you have used any other PDF compressor tool that worked well for you, be sure to share it with us and our readers.