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Compress a PDF to 150KB

150 KB is tighter than it sounds: it leaves room for one scanned page rather than two. Compress can open with 150 KB already chosen, lower picture quality only as far as that size needs, and show you what the finished file weighs before you save it. Your PDF stays on your device the whole time. A file with several scanned pages will not fit, and you are told so instead of being handed a file that misses.

Updated

Compress a PDF to 150 KB

What can get under 150 KB

  • One page photographed with a phone and saved as a PDF. Our 12-megapixel test photo of a page went under 100 KB, so 150 KB leaves it some quality to spare.
  • One page scanned in color, at a low setting. Our one-page 300 DPI scan reached 100 KB only at the lowest step and 200 KB one step higher, so expect 150 KB to need one of the two lowest, and read the small print in the preview.

What will not get under 150 KB

  • Two pages scanned in color. Each page of our test scans was still a little over 80 KB at the lowest step, so two of them together are over 150 KB whatever Compress does.
  • A typed PDF that is large because of the fonts inside it, which Compress has no way to shrink because it re-saves pictures only.
  • A scan stored page by page in a lossless format instead of JPEG; Compress keeps those pictures exactly as they came.
  • A PDF with a password, which Compress refuses rather than opens.

More on this: Why PDF files get large.

If your PDF stays over 150 KB

Upload the one page that matters

When the form wants a certificate and your PDF also carries its covering letter or its reverse side, Extract PDF Pages saves the page the form asked for as a file of its own.

Open Extract PDF Pages

Take a photo of the page

Our phone photo of a page shrank further than our scan of one. Photograph the page flat and in good light, turn the photo into a PDF with JPG to PDF, and compress that file.

Open JPG to PDF

Ask the scanner for gray

If the form does not say the copy must be in color, scanning in grayscale gives Compress a smaller page to start from.

Forms that ask for 150 KB

This page quotes no form yet. We quote a limit only once we have read it on the publisher's own page and dated it, and we have not done that for 150 KB, so the instructions of the form you are filling in are the place to check.

A different size

Aiming for a different size? Each of these has its own page.

If you have no set size to hit, open Compress PDF without a target and choose from the sizes it offers for your file.

If the form asks you to resize the PDF, it means the file size: Resize PDF does the same job under that name and leaves every page its own size.

Compress runs in your browser. Your PDF is not uploaded, there is no account, and no watermark is added to the smaller copy.