How to reduce the size of a pdf file

Sometimes pdf documents and files are generally too large and can not be saved to a memory or sent as attachments to an email.

It often happens that you have to reduce the size of a pdf because it is too large and can not be sent as an attachment with an email. A problem that can also arise with other types of files such as images, videos, documents and so on.

Files that are too large are difficult to manage. In addition to exceeding the maximum size allowed by email attachments, occupy a lot of space on the computer disk and sometimes do not enter our pendrive. To reduce the size of a file you can use different procedures, more or less complicated depending on the type of file.

If you have to reduce the size of a photo, you usually resort to a program that decreases resolution or quality. Conversely, with the videos, we proceed to the conversion in a compressed format. With music we use a format that takes up less space like mp3. In short, the solutions are many and it would be really difficult to dissect them all.

However, there is a solution that can be applied to most types of files that we usually use. This is the FileOptimizer program, an open source software that can be used to reduce the size of PDF, photos and many other types of files.

FileOptimizer is free and allows us to compress most of the files that we usually use with a single program. Therefore we do not have to install a different compression application for each type of file. To download FileOptimizer just go with the browser on https://sourceforge.net/projects/nikkhokkho/, go to the Files tab, select the FileOptimizer folder and then click on the folder at the top of the list, which is the one containing the installation files with the ‘latest version.

At this point we just have to click on the link FileOptimizerSetup.exe to download the FileOptimizer installation file. After a few seconds, the file will be downloaded and saved on your computer. Once finished, just double click on the FileOptimizerSetup.exe file to install the program.

After starting FileOptimizer, we can import the pdf or file to be compressed by going to File and selecting Add files. Alternatively, we can also drag the file directly to the program window.

After adding the files, select Options from the Optimize menu. From this window we can configure the conversion parameters for the various file types. For a pdf file, for example, we can set the DPI, which is the resolution expressed in dots per inch. The smaller this value is, the smaller the final file size will be. But be careful: by decreasing the resolution, the quality also decreases.

After configuring the compression options, click on OK, let’s go back to Optimize and this time select Optimize all files to start file compression. The processed files will be automatically placed in the Windows Recycle Bin to give us the possibility to restore them if the final compressed file does not meet our expectations.