Deflate Support

Because for that file, it couldn't — not without making the page unreadable.

Every document has a floor. A dense, multi-megapixel scan simply cannot become a legible 40 KB file; past a point, shrinking further means destroying the text you needed to keep. Deflate stops at that floor and hands back the smallest readable version, telling you what it reached and what you aimed for.

That result is still worth having. A file that went from 9.6 MB to 187 KB is 98% smaller and will clear most upload limits, even though the target said 40 KB. Deflate would rather show you a useful file and an honest number than a failure message or a ruined page.

That's expected. A JPEG can only hold one image, so a multi-page document becomes one JPEG per page rather than silently losing everything after page one.

If you need a single file, choose PDF as the output format instead.

Deflate reads each page before touching it. Pages containing real, selectable text are “born-digital” — they pass through completely untouched, staying sharp at any zoom.

Scanned pages are pictures of text, and pictures are the only thing that can be compressed. So in a mixed document, the typed pages stay perfect and only the scans change. That difference is the feature, not a glitch.

Choose Black & White for scans of printed or handwritten text. It evens out uneven lighting and converts the page to pure black and white, which compresses dramatically better than colour and keeps letter edges crisp.

Choose Colour for anything where colour carries meaning — photos, ID cards, stamps, signatures in coloured ink, charts.

The choice applies to the whole document, so pick based on what most of your scanned pages need.

It was probably already efficient. A PDF made of real text rather than scans is mostly instructions for drawing letters, and there is very little there to squeeze — it may already be under your target, in which case Deflate passes it straight through untouched.

Compression has the most room to work when a document is made of scanned or photographed pages.

Photos too. Import a JPEG, PNG, or HEIC exactly as you would a PDF — by picking it or dragging it in — and every tool works on it, compression included.

Phone photos land the right way up: Deflate reads the orientation your camera recorded instead of ignoring it, so a portrait shot doesn't arrive on its side.

Use the Crop tool. Pick a preset — Passport 35×45 mm, Signature, or Square — and the crop box locks to that shape so you can't accidentally produce the wrong proportions. Freeform is there when you need an unusual size.

Deflate then resizes to the exact pixel dimensions at roughly 300 dpi and compresses to your target KB without shrinking the image below those dimensions. That matters: forms usually check both, and hitting the file size by quietly reducing the pixel size is how a photo gets rejected.

It reads the text in a scanned document and adds an invisible, selectable layer on top of it. The page looks exactly the same, but you can now search the PDF, and select and copy its text.

The original page is kept underneath, untouched — nothing is redrawn or replaced. Recognition runs on your device using Apple's Vision framework; the text is never sent anywhere.

Yes — “Create PDF from images” on the Home screen. Pick your images and Deflate builds a single PDF with one image per page, in the order you chose. Useful for receipts, or for a document you photographed a page at a time.

Yes. Split shows every page as a thumbnail; tap the ones you want, or use the page-range picker for something like 3–17. You can extract the selection as one combined PDF, or save each page as its own separate file.

Wherever you save or share them to. Deflate works on a copy inside its own storage and never modifies your original. Nothing is uploaded, backed up to us, or synced anywhere — see the privacy policy.

No, and it cannot use one. The app contains no networking code whatsoever. Everything — compression, merging, splitting, cropping, and OCR — runs on your device, in airplane mode if you like.

Deflate is free, and it carries no advertising in any tier — that will not change. If a one-time purchase is ever added for advanced options, it will be a single purchase rather than a subscription, and the core tools will stay free.