Optimize PDFs

Whether you're delivering PDFs from your website, or using Cloudinary to store and share them, PDF compression may be of interest to you. By compressing PDFs, especially if they're image rich, you can benefit from big storage savings and faster download speeds.

Automatic quality for PDFs

You can optimize the size of your PDFs automatically:

• On delivery from Cloudinary
• On upload to Cloudinary
• On demand for PDFs that already exist in Cloudinary

In each case, use the automatic quality transformation (q_auto in URLs), which applies a certain amount of compression to your PDFs, while maintaining visual quality.

Optimize PDFs on delivery

If you're storing your original uncompressed PDFs in your Cloudinary product environment, you can deliver compressed PDFs on the fly to your end users without affecting the original copy.

To deliver optimized PDFs, apply the q_auto transformation parameter to your delivery URL, either directly, or using one of our SDKs, as shown:

In this case, the original PDF is 1.8 MB and the optimized PDF is 1.1 MB.

Optimize PDFs on upload

If you want to save on storage, you can optimize PDFs on upload using an incoming transformation. In this case, the compressed version of the PDF is stored in your product environment.

Response:

Optimize previously uploaded PDFs

If you've got original, uncompressed PDFs already in your Cloudinary product environment, and you want to save some storage, you can follow these steps to overwrite an original PDF with an optimized PDF:

1. Use the original PDF's URL as the upload source.
2. Apply the automatic quality transformation as an incoming transformation.
3. Set the public ID to match the existing PDF.
4. Include the overwrite and invalidate parameters.

For example:

This applies the automatic quality transformation, overwrites the existing asset, and invalidates any cached versions on the CDN.