PDF target
Compress PDF to 5MB
Notion caps uploads at 5MB, so that is the number your file has to come in under. Drop a PDF below and it will be compressed to fit on your own machine -- nothing is uploaded, there is no watermark, and the size is verified by measuring the output rather than by estimating it.
2Add your file
Video, images and PDFs, all compressed on your own machine. No upload, no account, no watermark, no limit on how many files.
The same tool takes video, images and PDFs, at this size or any other.
Who enforces it
What uses a 5MB limit
Mechanism
How this works
Four steps. The byte count is measured at every one of them.
- 01
The document is opened locally
Page count and size are read in your browser. A PDF is often the most sensitive thing anyone compresses, and this one does not leave the machine it is on.
- 02
Lossless is tried first, and measured
The file is rewritten with object streams and duplicated resources dropped. If that alone measures under 5MB, it is what you get -- text still selectable, search still working, glyphs still sharp.
- 03
Only then are the pages rasterised
If lossless was not enough, each page is rendered to an image. That reaches any target, but it is permanent: Ctrl+F finds nothing afterwards. You are told before it happens, not after.
- 04
Render scale is bisected, not guessed
Scale is searched before JPEG quality, because too few pixels reads as a small scan while heavy JPEG on text edges reads as something being broken. The best result measured under 5MB ships.
Questions
Compressing PDF to 5MB
- How do I compress a PDF to 5MB?
- Drop the file into the tool on this page -- the target is already set to 5MB. The work happens in your browser on your own machine, so there is no upload, no queue and no account. The output is measured before you are given it, so it is genuinely under 5MB.
- Is that exactly 5MB, or approximately 5MB?
- Under it, and verified. The byte count of the finished file is measured and compared against the limit before anything is handed back, and if it came in over, it is done again. 5MB here means 5 decimal megabytes -- 5,000,000 bytes -- which is the smaller of the two readings a platform might intend, so it clears either.
- Will the text still be selectable after compressing to 5MB?
- If the lossless pass reaches 5MB, yes -- the text, the search index and the accessibility tree are all untouched. If it does not, reaching 5MB requires rendering the pages to images, which ends selectable text permanently. You are told which of the two happened, and warned before anything is rasterised rather than after.
- Is it safe to compress a confidential document here?
- The file is never uploaded. There is no server to send it to -- the whole pipeline is JavaScript running in your own browser tab, which is why there is no queue and no account. Nothing about the document reaches us, including its name.
Nearby
Other sizes
Landed on the wrong number? The right one is one click away.
Other files
Not what you were holding?
Each family reaches your number a different way, because each has a different dial to turn.
Background
Worth reading first
The arithmetic behind the number, and what to do when it will not fit.
- Notion's 5MB upload limitNotion's free plan rejects any file over 5MB, and its own help page gives three different numbers for paid plans. Here is what actually applies.
- When a PDF is too large to emailGmail says 25MB and means about 18MB. Outlook says 20MB and often means less. Here is why the published numbers lie, and what to do about a 40MB document.