Comparison

Compress PDF vs Image Compressor

decide whether to compress a document as a PDF or compress the underlying images.

If your PDF is mostly photos or scans, the compression happening 'inside' the PDF is really image compression. That means you have two workflow choices: compress the finished PDF, or compress each source image first and rebuild the PDF from them.

Compress PDF is the fast path — one drop, one download, done. It picks a reasonable quality target for you.

Image Compressor gives you per-image control. Use it when a few pages need to look crisp (title page, diagrams) and the rest can be aggressively shrunk.

Feature comparison

Feature	Compress PDF	Image Compressor
Input	A finished PDF	Individual JPG/PNG/WebP files
Quality control	Whole-document quality slider	Per-image quality slider
Workflow	One step	Compress → then JPG to PDF
Best when	You already have the PDF	You're building a new PDF from scans

Our verdict

Start with Compress PDF. If specific pages come out too soft, extract the source images, run them through Image Compressor with a higher quality, and rebuild with JPG to PDF for that section.

Frequently asked questions

Does compressing images before making a PDF give a smaller file?+

Usually yes — you skip the double-encoding step. But the difference is small (5–15%) for typical settings; the main win is per-image quality control.