Deflate
PDFs and photos, at the size you were asked for
The form said under 200 KB. Your scan is 9 MB. Your passport photo has to be 35×45 mm and under 50 KB, and the upload button greys out until it is.
Nobody gave you a quality slider. They gave you a number. Deflate is built around that number — for PDFs and photos alike — and it is honest with you about the one thing every other compressor quietly lies about: whether it actually got there.
What the result screen actually says
◆ Deflate
Bachelor_1st_Year.pdf · 4 pages
Above target — 98% smaller
40 KB isn't reachable for this scan without dropping below readable. This is the smallest legible result.
No fake success, no silent degradation. The number you see is the number the file is.
Built for Honesty
A Target in Kilobytes
Works on PDFs and photos. Choose your output — JPEG or PDF — then pick a size the way the form asked for it: 20, 50, 100, 200 KB and up, or type your own number. Not “high quality”. Not a slider. The figure you were actually given.
A Legibility Floor
Every target has a point past which hitting the number means destroying the page. Deflate stops there, hands back the smallest readable result, and says plainly what it reached versus what you aimed for — instead of shipping a ruined file that technically complies.
Real Text Stays Sharp
Deflate reads each page before touching it. Pages with genuine text are born-digital and pass through untouched, still selectable and still vector. Only scanned pages get re-encoded — so a mixed document never loses the half that was already perfect.
Photos, Cut to Spec
Passport 35×45 mm, signature strip, square, or freeform. Drag the box, and Deflate crops to the exact pixel dimensions at 300 dpi — then hits your target KB without shrinking the photo below the size the form demands. Getting both right at once is the whole trick.
Scans That Can Be Searched
Make Searchable reads the text in a scan and lays an invisible, selectable layer over it. The page looks identical — but now it's findable, and the text can be copied out. Recognition runs on your device; nothing is sent anywhere to be read.
The Rest of the Paperwork
Merge files into one. Pull a page range out to its own PDF, or split every page into its own file. Rotate and drag pages into the right order. Turn a pile of photos into a single PDF, one page each — with phone shots landing the right way up, because Deflate reads their orientation instead of ignoring it.
Nothing Leaves Your Device
This is not a policy promise layered over a server — there is no server. Deflate contains no networking code at all: no URLSession, no Network framework, no outbound request anywhere in the app. Compression, OCR, and every other operation run on your device using Apple's own frameworks. There are no accounts, no analytics, no third-party SDKs, and no ads in any tier.
Privacy & Support
Deflate collects nothing and transmits nothing. Read the full policy, or get help with a file that didn't behave the way you expected:
Built with Swift & SwiftUI on PDFKit, Vision, Core Image and ImageIO — no third-party dependencies in the processing pipeline.