Gmail limits attachments to 25MB, Outlook to 20MB, and many job and government portals cap uploads at 2MB or even 500KB. Scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs blow past these limits easily.
Why PDFs get big
Almost always it's images: scanned pages, phone photos of documents, or high-resolution pictures in a brochure. Text itself takes very little space.
Option 1: Compress the PDF
Drop it into the PDF compressor. It recompresses the images inside and removes redundant data, showing the size saved. Note that unlike our image tools, PDF compression runs on our server.
Option 2: Shrink images before making the PDF
If you're creating the PDF from photos (for example, scanning documents with your phone):
- Resize the photos to about 1600 px wide with the image resizer — plenty for readable A4 pages.
- Compress them at 70–80% with the image compressor.
- Combine them into a PDF with your phone's or computer's print-to-PDF feature.
This often produces PDFs 5–10× smaller than scanning at full resolution.
Tips for scans
- Scan in greyscale instead of colour when colour isn't needed.
- 150–200 DPI is enough for readable documents; 600 DPI is overkill.
- Crop away the empty margins.
Still too big?
Split the document into parts, or upload it to cloud storage and share a link instead of attaching it.