PDF Smasher

Make your PDFs tiny. Free, private, and beautifully simple.

A native macOS app that shrinks PDF files with a single drag and drop.
No subscriptions. No paywalls. No uploads. Your files never leave your Mac.

✨ Why PDF Smasher?

Email attachment limits, upload forms that reject big files, a full iCloud: oversized PDFs get in the way all the time. PDF Smasher fixes that in seconds.

🪶 Drastically smaller Image-heavy PDFs often shrink by 90% or more. In our tests a 204 MB photo document came down to 777 KB and still looked great on screen.	🔒 100% private Everything runs on your Mac. No cloud, no account, no tracking, no network access at all. Safe for contracts, medical records and tax returns.	🆓 Free forever No trial, no watermark, no "upgrade to save". Every feature is unlocked, and the source code is open for anyone to inspect.
⚡ Drag, drop, done Drop files or whole folders onto the window. Compression starts immediately and you see the result before you save anything.	📝 Even text-only PDFs shrink Built-in lossless optimization repacks fonts, text and file structure. Text-only documents typically get 10 to 20% smaller with zero quality loss.	🍎 Truly native Built with SwiftUI for a fast, modern Mac experience. Supports dark mode and keyboard shortcuts, and runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel.

🎛️ Choose how hard to smash

Pick a profile from the toolbar. Every file is re-compressed instantly, so you can try several and keep the one you like.

Profile	Best for	Images
Light	Printing, archiving at high quality	up to 300 dpi · 85% quality
Medium	Everyday sharing (default)	up to 200 dpi · 70% quality
Strong	Email attachments	up to 144 dpi · 55% quality
Extreme	Upload limits, smallest readable files	up to 96 dpi · 40% quality
Flatten to Images	Scanned documents	every page becomes a single optimized image

Need something specific? Create your own profile with exact resolution, quality, grayscale and cleanup options, then export it as a .pdfsmash file to share with your team.

🧰 Everything you get

• 📂 Batch compression. Drop hundreds of PDFs or entire folders at once.
• 👀 Live before/after preview. See the new size and percentage saved, and toggle Compare to view the original.
• 💾 Flexible saving. Save replaces the original (with Restore if you change your mind), Save As… creates a copy, and Save All to Folder… exports a whole batch.
• 📤 Share instantly via Mail, Messages, AirDrop and other share options.
• 🎨 Grayscale conversion for even smaller black-and-white documents.
• 🧹 Clean up documents: remove metadata, remove comments and highlights, or flatten annotations into the page.
• 🏷️ Edit document info such as title, author, subject and keywords.
• 📄 Extract text from any PDF to a plain .txt file.
• 🛡️ Never makes things worse. If a file can't get smaller, your original stays untouched.
• ⌨️ Command-line tool for automation and scripts (see below).

📥 Download & install

1. Download PDF-Smasher-x.y.z.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open the DMG and drag PDF Smasher into your Applications folder.
3. Launch it and drop in a PDF. 🎉

Note

"PDF Smasher can't be opened because Apple cannot verify it"? This appears for apps distributed outside the Mac App Store without a paid Apple signature. To open it anyway: right-click the app → Open → Open. On recent macOS versions, go to System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. You only need to do this once.

Requirements: macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon or Intel Mac

💻 Command line

PDF Smasher includes pdfsmash, a command-line tool for scripts, Shortcuts and automation:

# Optional: make it available everywhere
sudo ln -s "/Applications/PDF Smasher.app/Contents/Helpers/pdfsmash" /usr/local/bin/pdfsmash

pdfsmash report.pdf                        # → report-smashed.pdf
pdfsmash -p extreme --gray invoices/*.pdf  # maximum compression, grayscale
pdfsmash --dpi 120 -q 50 -o out/ scans/*.pdf
pdfsmash --help                            # all options

❓ FAQ

Is it really free? What's the catch?

There is no catch. PDF Smasher is open-source software under the MIT license: no ads, no tracking, no in-app purchases. If you find it useful, a ⭐ on GitHub is much appreciated.

Will compression ruin the quality of my document?

Text and vector graphics stay perfectly sharp. Only embedded images are resampled, and you control how much. Use Light or Medium for documents you'll print, and Strong or Extreme for on-screen reading. The Compare button lets you check the result before saving.

Does it upload my files anywhere?

No. PDF Smasher never connects to the internet. Everything happens locally using Apple's PDF engine and the bundled open-source qpdf tool.

Why didn't my PDF get smaller?

Some PDFs are already well optimized. Try a stronger profile; for scanned documents, Flatten to Images usually works best. PDF Smasher never saves a file that is larger than the original.

Can it open password-protected PDFs?

Not yet. Files that need a password to open are marked as protected and left untouched.

🛠️ Build from source

brew install cmake                       # needed once, to build qpdf
git clone https://github.com/alansmathew/PDFSmasher.git
cd PDFSmasher
Scripts/build-app.sh                     # → dist/PDF Smasher.app + dist/PDF-Smasher-1.0.0.dmg

To work on the code, open the folder in Xcode (xed .) and run the PDFSmasher scheme. In Edit Scheme ▸ Run ▸ Options, set the working directory to the project folder so the bundled qpdf is found.

Signing & notarizing a release

xcrun notarytool store-credentials pdfsmasher --apple-id you@example.com --team-id TEAMID
SIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)" NOTARY_PROFILE=pdfsmasher \
VERSION=1.0.0 Scripts/build-app.sh

Project layout

Sources/SmasherCore/   compression engine, shared by the app and the CLI
Sources/PDFSmasher/    SwiftUI macOS app
Sources/pdfsmash/      command-line tool
Scripts/               build, qpdf and asset-generation scripts
Resources/             Info.plist, icons, image assets, third-party licenses

Every icon and illustration is drawn in code by Scripts/generate-assets.swift, so the artwork is easy to tweak and fully open source too.

🤝 Contributing

Bug reports, feature ideas and pull requests are very welcome.

• 🐛 Found a bug? Open an issue and, if you can, attach a sample PDF.
• 💡 Have an idea? Start a discussion or open an issue.
• ⭐ Like the app? Star the repo to help others discover it!

📜 License

PDF Smasher is released under the MIT License.

It bundles qpdf (Apache-2.0) and libjpeg-turbo (IJG / BSD-3-Clause). Their licenses are included in Resources/ThirdParty.

PDF Smasher is an independent project and is not affiliated with any other PDF software vendor.

Made with ❤️ for the Mac.

Download PDF Smasher →