How to Reduce the File Size of your PDF Without Much Quality Loss

One of the biggest problems of today’s modern world is not that we do not have enough uses for the amazing technology that is all around us, but that it is so difficult to send one file to another person! So many of our email systems now have specific file limits, as do many of the places that we work, and so sending over high resolution PDFs from one computer to another espacially over email can be highly problematic.

There are many online and offline methods to compress a PDF file are available but you do not want to compromise on the quality of the PDFs that you create and enjoy, because a huge part of them are the clever graphics, the beautiful photos, and the way that they are woven together – but when that comes at the cost of being able to send these bloated files to anyone, you quickly learn that unless you can start to slim them down, there’s no way that they are ever leaving your inbox.

 

reduce file size of your pdf file

 

Reducing the file size of a PDF doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to get rid of a load of the content – instead, you can use one of these two excellent ways to simply compress or shrink the overall file size of your PDF. Nothing has to get deleted, and so everyone wins. Read on below for these two clever and simple ways to reduce the file size of your PDFs without compromising on their quality:

 

1. Shrink PDF File Size with PDFelement Software

PDFelement is a PDF editing tool available for Windows and Mac OS that can compress, modify, annotate and OCR your PDF documents. You may follow the links below to download it as per your operating system:

 

download free trial version of PDF Editordownload PDF Editor for Mac free

 

 

Step 1: Open the PDF file in the PDFelment

After you have installed the program, you will need to open up PDFelement onto your computer. Once it has opened, you should be able to see the ‘Open…’ (if you're using Mac, click "Open File" button) option on the home screen of the window, and once you click it once you will have the option to choose a file. You should then choose the large PDF that you need to shrink down in size.

 

open pdf file in PDFelement

 

Step 2: Choose the compression setting

Next you need to click on ‘File’, and click on the option ‘Optimize’. You will then be given a variety of different compression options, and as you decide which one is right for you, your file, and your situation, remember that you can preview the results of each compression option in the window. For example, web ready will convert your PDF file into the smallest size possible for internet use.

Tip: If you don't want to use preset options to compress your PDF file, you can select "Custom" option to set the compression settings manually.

 

compression settings to reduce file size of PDF

 

Step 3: Choose the destination folder to save your new compressed PDF

Once you have decided which compression option is the best one for you, click on “Optimize” button and select the destination folder and click “Save” button to save your compressed PDF document. This will begin the compression process immediately without you needing to do anything else.

 

2. Reduce PDF File Size with Adobe Acrobat

If Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer, you can follow the steps below to reduce the size of your PDF document:

shrinking PDF with Adobe Acrobat

 

Step 1: Open up Acrobat on your computer, and then open the file that is too large. You will then need to press ‘Ctrl’ and ‘D’ at the same time to open the Document Properties, so that you can see the current size of the PDF. You can find this under the ‘Advanced’ menu option, and then ‘File size’.

 

Step 2: On the menu bar you will see ‘File’. Click it and then choose ‘Save as’, and then you will see an option called ‘Reduce Size PDF’. You will then need to choose the Acrobat Version Compatibility from the list, bearing in mind that the more recent the version, the larger the file size will be.

 

Step 3: Choose ‘OK’ for compression to begin, and your file will then be automatically saved. Once it is complete, you can once again check the file size by pressing ‘Ctrl’ and ‘D’ at the same time, and then going to ‘Advanced’ and then ‘File size’. If your document is still not small enough for your requirements, you will need to choose an older version of Adobe when you compress and save it.

Need more advanced options to optimize your PDF document via Acrobat, you can go to File > Save As Other > Optimized PDF.

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