Why PDFs get huge
The PDFs that clog your inbox and blow past upload limits are almost always scans and image-heavy documents — a phone-scanned contract, a photographed form, a slide deck full of screenshots. Each page is stored as a large, high-resolution image, so a 20-page scan can easily be 50–100MB. Text-only PDFs exported from Word or Google Docs are usually small already; it’s the images that cost you.
Most “compress PDF” sites solve this by uploading your document to their server — a genuinely bad idea when that document is a signed contract, a passport scan, or medical paperwork. Mynify shrinks it in your browser instead, so the file never leaves your device.
How it works
Mynify opens your PDF locally, re-renders each page at a sensible resolution, and re-encodes it with efficient compression — then reassembles a fresh PDF. Pick Balanced for the everyday sweet spot, High quality to keep pages crisp, or Small to squeeze hardest for email. You’ll see progress page by page, and the final size when it’s done.
Because it re-renders pages, this approach is ideal for scanned and image-heavy PDFs and will shrink them a lot. For a PDF that’s already just text, there may be nothing to gain — so if the result would be larger than your original, Mynify keeps your original automatically and tells you. No file ever comes out bigger than it went in.
Tips
- Scans compress best. The more image data a page holds, the more there is to save.
- Use a laptop for very large files. A 100-page, high-resolution scan is memory-hungry; desktops handle it more comfortably than phones.
- Keep the original if you need searchable text. Flattened pages look identical but aren’t selectable — hold onto the source if that matters.
No signup, no watermark, no upload, no limits — your document stays entirely on your device, start to finish.