How to Compress PDFs in Windows 10

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a universal document format that can be opened on any platform using one of the many free or commercial PDF viewers available.

It’s a very common format for sending documents via text or email as the recipient should always be able to read it. However, PDFs can be quite large, especially if they have a lot of graphics or videos. This can cause some issues when trying to send PDFs via email due to limits on attachment sizes.

Additionally, storing large PDFs on your computer can take up excessive amounts of storage space. As a result, you might be interested in learning how you can easily compress PDFs in Windows 10 in order to save storage space.

Fortunately, there are many tools available online that make compressing PDFs as quick and easy as possible.

Let’s take a look at how you can use three of these free tools to easily compress a PDF file in Windows 10.

How Do I Reduce the Size of a PDF File in Windows 10?

For this tutorial, we’ll be focusing on three tools in particular: TechJunkie’s PDF Tools, 4dots Free PDF Compressor, and iLovePDF.

In addition to compressing PDFs, these tools make it easy to make other adjustments to your PDFs and other document types.

Let’s take a look at how you can use these tools to easily compress PDFs in order to save storage space on your computer.

TinyWow PDF Tools

There are several free options to compress PDF files online. For this tutorial, we’ll be using our in-house tools because we know they’re both free and secure.

This compression tool will work on both Windows and Mac, so while this tutorial focuses on Windows, Mac users can use this option just as easily.

Step 1

Go to our free pdf compression tool.

Step 2

Upload your PDF and wait for the file to compress.

Step 3

Download the compressed file.

That’s all there is to it. TechJunkie’s PDF tools make it easy to quickly compress a PDF file.

4dots Free PDF Compressor

4dots Free PDF Compressor is a freeware package you can add to Windows 10 and earlier iterations of Windows from this page.

Step 1

To install the program, press the DOWNLOAD NOW button on the page.

Once the download is complete, open the application and walk through the installation process to get started.

Step 2

Open the program and select either Add File(s) or Add Folder to open a specific PDF or a folder that contains them.

Once you upload a file, it will open the PDF in the program, as shown in the image below. Note that you can also compress a batch of PDFs with this software, so you don’t have to waste time doing one at a time.

Step 3

Select an output folder, or path, by pressing the folder button at the bottom of the window. If you don’t choose a specific folder, it will save the compressed PDF in the same path as the original, so be careful not to overwrite the original PDF if you still need access to it.

Click the Compress Images checkbox and drag the bar further right to retain more image quality. This will make sure that your images don’t come out blurry.

Then, press the Compress button at the top of the window to shrink the file size of your PDF(s).

Open the folder you saved the compressed document in to check its new size. You should get quite a reduction in megabytes. For example, I compressed a PDF from 1.7 MB to 338 KB, which is less than a third of the original file size.

Final Thoughts

Whether you need to submit your resume for a job application or share a presentation with a colleague, PDFs are one of the easiest and most accessible file types in existence. However, it’s important to know how to compress them in order to save storage space and make sending them easier.

With TechJunkie’s own PDF Tools, 4dots Free PDF Compressor software, and iLovePDF, you can quickly and easily compress any PDF file in Windows 10. Each of these tools can considerably reduce PDF document sizes, which is a fantastic way to free up some storage space on your laptop and make sending documents via email simpler and quicker.