Your Pixel just made a beautiful 38 MB PDF out of a contract scan. Gmail won't send anything over 25 MB. The Play Store wants £4.99 a month to fix this.
Chrome does it free, in thirty seconds.
Why phone scans are huge
Android's scanner apps (Google Drive scan, Samsung Notes scan) save pages as high-res images embedded in the PDF. Great fidelity, terrible filesize. Nothing in Android natively compresses these afterward.
Flint's compressor downsamples those embedded images while keeping text crisp. Typical 80–95% size reduction.
How to compress in Chrome
Open Chrome, navigate to Flint, tap Compress PDF. Upload the file. Pick a quality preset — Medium handles 90% of cases. Hit compress, download the smaller file. Total time: about thirty seconds for a typical 10-page scan.
Share the result via Gmail, Drive, WhatsApp, anywhere — it'll send.
When to combine with other tools
Sometimes the right fix isn't compression but trimming. If you only need pages 1–5 of a 50-page scan, split the PDF or delete unwanted pages first, then compress the remainder. The end result is dramatically smaller than compressing the full document.
FAQ
Does compression make text harder to read?
Medium compression keeps text sharp on screen and in print. High compression is more aggressive — fine for archival, less ideal for client work. Try Medium first.
Can I compress on cellular data?
Yes, but uploads of large PDFs over mobile data can be slow. For 30+ MB files, switch to Wi-Fi for a faster upload. Smaller files (under 10 MB) compress fine on 4G/5G.
Is there a size limit?
Flint handles typical Android PDFs without issue. Very large files (200+ MB) work but take longer to upload. For routine use — 5–50 MB scans — there's no practical limit.
Stop wrestling with attachment limits. Compress the PDF in Chrome and send.