Skinny Jean

Yes. Skinny Jean compresses the photos and scans embedded in the PDF, not the page itself. The type and vector artwork are left alone.

The one exception is a file that can only reach a very small target by flattening pages into images. That is a last resort, it is labeled as such in the results, and it only happens when nothing else would fit.

Yes. After a file is done, move the slider and run it again at the new number — on the Mac the widget offers it, and on iPhone and iPad the Squeeze button comes back the moment you change the target. Either way, no hunting for the original.

It is worth doing. The compressor picks a different combination of resolution and quality for each target, so 1.9 MB and 1.5 MB are not just different sizes, they are different-looking pages. Below 2 MB the slider moves in tenths so you can walk it in.

Two neighboring targets will occasionally hand you an identical file. That is the search being honest — both landed on the same setting — rather than anything going wrong.

Yes — fillable form boxes, active links, annotations and bookmarks all carry over. You won’t have to worry about clients receiving dead links or locked forms.

This is worth asking of any PDF compressor. Flattening a page still looks right, so the loss goes unnoticed until someone tries to click a link or sign a form.

Because email attachments are base64-encoded behind the scenes, inflating their size by about 33% when sent over the wire. An 18 MB file reliably slides under Google’s 25 MB ceiling after encoding, without getting bounced or converted to a Drive link.

Outlook is deliberately not folded into the same preset. Microsoft’s default is 35 MB for sending and administrators can raise it to 150 MB, so a target sized for Gmail would be needlessly small there. Use the slider.

Skinny Jean first tries splitting the document into clean, readable parts that each meet the size limit. If it still can’t make weight without altering the document structure, it lets you know upfront — you get the smallest version it could produce intact, with a note that it fell short.

This is usually a document that is mostly vector artwork rather than photographs. There is simply less to compress in a page of line art than in a page of camera images.

Never. Skinny Jean writes a new yourfile-compressed.pdf and leaves your master file pristine and untouched. If that name is taken, it numbers the new one rather than overwriting anything.

On the Mac it lands in your Downloads folder. On iPhone and iPad it goes wherever you send it — Save to Files, Mail, Messages, AirDrop.

Maybe — check before you rely on it. There is no single limit for electronic filing; every court sets its own, and the spread is enormous. The preset is set conservatively at 10 MB, which is the strictest common ceiling we found, so a file that fits it should clear most systems.

For scale: the Second Circuit caps a single PDF at 10 MB, eFileTexas and eFileCA at 25 MB, the Northern District of Georgia at 30 MB, the Central District of California at 35 MB, Florida’s ePortal at 50 MB, and NYSCEF at 100 MB. Across all federal courts the range runs from about 3 MB to 200 MB.

If your court is more generous, use the slider — there is no reason to compress further than you have to, and every megabyte you give back is image quality you keep.

Because Mac App Store apps run in Apple’s sandbox. Dropping a file grants the app access to that one file, not to the folder it came from, so writing a sibling next to it isn’t permitted.

Downloads is the one folder an app can be granted outright, which keeps a drop to a single gesture with no save dialog in the way.

That’s the case it handles best — scans are almost entirely images, which is exactly what there is room to compress. A 200 MB scan can come down to a couple of megabytes and still be perfectly readable.

No. There is no network code in the app at all. Everything happens on your own device, which is what makes it usable for material you are not allowed to upload to a website in the first place.

On the Mac that is enforced rather than promised — the app is not granted the sandbox’s network entitlement, so it could not reach the internet if it tried. iOS gives every app network access and no way to renounce it, so there the claim is about what the app does: it contains no networking code and makes no requests.

Any Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later. It ships as a universal binary, so it runs natively on both Apple silicon and Intel machines.

On iPhone and iPad, iOS and iPadOS 18 or later.

No. It is one purchase covering Mac, iPhone and iPad. Buy it on either and it appears on the other, on the same Apple Account, at no extra cost.

Two ways. Open the app to set a size and pick a PDF, or scan a paper document straight to that size with the camera.

Or skip the app entirely: Skinny Jean appears in the share sheet wherever you can share a PDF. Tap Share in Files, Mail or Safari, choose Skinny Jean, set the size and squeeze — then send the smaller file on from the same sheet.

Not while they are locked. Skinny Jean refuses them rather than handing back a blank document, which is what would otherwise happen. Remove the password first, then compress.