Compress a Portfolio PDF and Design Exports on Your Mac

There is no single number. Each platform, portal and print vendor sets its own, and Squarespace publishes a recommendation far below its hard cap. These are the ones we opened and read at the source on 9 October 2026.

Two names are missing on purpose. Behance and Adobe Portfolio have upload rules, but neither publishes a figure we have verified, and a number we have not read at the source does not go on this page. Check the current upload specs in Behance’s upload help and the Adobe Portfolio help center before you export for either.

For a portal you have never used, read the upload field first, then its help page. If neither says, assume the low end and ask the recruiter or the client.

Split the job in two before touching a setting. The print master keeps every pixel and goes to the press exactly as exported. The proof only has to be read on a laptop or a phone, so it can lose most of its pixels.

The best place to make the proof is the export dialog, because the application can do things a compressor cannot. Adobe’s presets are plain-text .joboptions files, and [Smallest File Size] downsamples color images to 100 ppi but does not embed fonts. That suits a proof you control and is the wrong preset for anything a printer will open. The full set of values, and why a print preset can still leave a file huge, is in why your InDesign PDF export is 50 MB.

When all you have is the PDF, a client’s file or last year’s export, compress a copy. This is what happened to a stand-in for an InDesign export: twelve A4 pages, 24 placements of 6,000 × 4,000 photographs, rendered by headless Chrome because the test Mac has no InDesign. Measured on an Apple M2 Pro on 26 September 2026.

Those PPI figures flatter the presets, and the reason matters. Smol’s presets are long-edge pixel caps (600, 900, 1,200, 1,800 and 2,400 px for Tiny through Original), so the resolution you get depends on how large the images sit on the page. This layout has small frames. On our full-bleed A4 test brochure, where landscape photos were cropped to portrait pages, the same Medium preset left 68 PPI, and Original left 137. For a screen proof that is fine. It is also the whole reason the next section exists. The mechanics are in what the presets actually do.

Illustrator PDFs follow the same logic, with one exception. A preset shrinks embedded images, so a mostly vector file has little to cap: a 7 KB text-and-vector control file shrank 0.3%, from 7,095 to 7,077 bytes (Smol 1.0.34), so expect little when a PDF has no large images.

Smaller than the cap, because the cap is not the only limit. Greenhouse allows up to 100 MB, but Refari stops at 4.2 MB, and if the file also travels by email, the mailbox sets another limit.

One disambiguation, because it decides which advice applies. An Acrobat “PDF Portfolio” is a container that bundles several files, and people ask Adobe’s community how to compress one. This page is about the ordinary kind: your portfolio laid out in InDesign, Keynote or Figma and saved as one flat PDF. It does not cover the container kind.

Keep two PDFs. The full portfolio is the one you present or link to. The application copy is shorter, with fewer spreads and heavier image compression, and it is the only one that ever goes through an upload field. If the field is too tight even for that, paste a link to a hosted copy where the form allows it. If you also post case studies as LinkedIn documents, the same copy works there, within the 100 MB and 300 page limit.

Compress before you sign. Compression writes a new file, so apply any digital signature to the compressed copy, not the other way round.

For email, work backwards from the cap. Mail servers measure the encoded message, which runs roughly a third larger than the file, so the target on disk is the cap divided by 1.37. The arithmetic and its sources are in getting a PDF under Gmail’s 25 MB limit.

On screen, Small caps images at 900 px on the long edge at about JPEG quality 45, and Medium caps them at 1,200 px at about quality 60. Start at Medium, then open the page with the finest detail at 100% zoom: hairline rules, small captions, a photograph with texture. If it holds, ship it. If the file is still over target, drop to Small and look again. If one photo-heavy spread turns to mush, go up a preset rather than down.

Portfolio pages with large images change the starting point. The caps are in pixels, so the same preset gives less resolution on a bigger placement. On our full-bleed A4 test brochure, where landscape photos were cropped to portrait pages, our measurements found about 51 PPI at Small, 68 at Medium, 103 at Large and 137 at Original. That is the trade: fine for a quick look, softer when someone zooms in. For an image-led portfolio, start at Large, look at 100%, and step down only if the file is still over target.

Scanned sketches are a special case, because a scan is only pixels. Start at Medium and go lower only after looking at the result; compressing a scanned PDF covers the details.

Start with what Figma gives you. Its export documentation lists four formats: PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF. WebP and AVIF are not on that list, so the modern formats happen after export. JPG quality defaults to High and PDF quality to Medium. SVG and PDF exports only support 1x. The color profile defaults to the file’s own, with sRGB and Display P3 as choices, and sRGB is the safe pick for the web.

Then convert or compress the files. On the published benchmark, 24 PNG photographs encoded to AVIF at quality 65 came out 92.1% smaller, and at default settings Smol made the same photos 69.2% smaller as PNG. Those are 768 × 512 film photographs from the Kodak suite, so treat the percentages as photographs, not interface mockups. We have no published Smol measurement on flat UI exports, so compare the AVIF against the PNG at 100% on your own file, looking at text edges and gradients, before you replace anything.

Check the destination before you pick the format. Squarespace’s help page accepts only JPG, GIF, PNG and WebP, so for that platform the choice is WebP or JPG. Use AVIF only where your host or CMS documents support for it. The same page warns that CMYK will not display correctly in most browsers, so export in RGB, with sRGB as the profile.

Convert and compress are different buttons

Convert has no working quality dial. In our PNG to WebP test (Smol 1.0.34), forcing quality to 40 produced a byte-identical file, and Convert to JPG ignores quality too. If you want a dial, use Compress and choose WebP or AVIF as the output. Smol writes lossy WebP only, so for a pixel-exact lossless WebP of a screenshot use cwebp, as the PNG to WebP article measures.

Raise the 2,000 px resize cap

Smol resizes images to fit inside 2,000 × 2,000 px unless you change it. A 1,440 px frame exported from Figma at 2x is 2,880 px wide, and the default would quietly shrink it. Squarespace calls 2,500 px wide ideal, so a 2,000 px cap costs you pixels there too. Set the maximum dimension to the width you actually export. It goes up to 32,768 px.

Watch the chroma on saturated type

Smol’s JPEG uses 4:2:0 chroma up to quality 75, 4:2:2 at 80 to 85 and 4:4:4 from 90. Saturated color against saturated color, such as red type on a blue panel, is where reduced chroma shows first. If text edges fringe, raise the quality to 90.

Fonts and SVG

Smol converts TTF, WOFF and WOFF2. In the linked test, fontTools (not Smol) took one 656,568 byte TTF down about 68% by changing it to WOFF2, and subsetting that font to its Latin range took it to 28,404 bytes, another 86.6% smaller. Subsetting is a separate step Smol does not do. See converting TTF to WOFF2 for the web, and check that your font license allows web embedding first. SVG is not supported at all. Icons stay SVG and go through an SVG optimizer.

One more thing for the live site: give every image width and height attributes. A single unsized image produced a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.158 in our test, and Google’s good line is 0.1. Agencies shipping whole sites will want the web agency page, which goes deeper on delivery.

Two of those rows deserve a second look. PDF “Original” is not lossless: it re-encodes images at about JPEG 88 and resamples anything above 2,400 px, so it is not the safe option for a master. And Smol has no lossless mode for images at all. Where pixel-identical output matters, ImageOptim is the answer; see the ImageOptim comparison.

1. 1

   Export at the size you need, once

   In Figma, set the scale and format in the Export section and export in sRGB. In our test Compress dropped the embedded profile on JPEG output, so do not rely on a profile surviving. From InDesign or Illustrator, export the master first, then the proof copy. Never compress the only copy of anything.

2. 2

   Drop the files or the folder on Smol

   PDFs, PNGs and JPEGs can share one batch. By default Smol writes each result next to its original with a _compressed suffix and leaves the source untouched.

3. 3

   Choose the setting

   For PDFs, pick a preset from the table above. For images, set the format, the quality and the maximum dimension. Save the combination as a preset if you will use it again.

4. 4

   Run it and read the per-file results

   Smol shows the savings for each file. When you drop files directly and compressing would make one larger, Smol keeps the original rather than handing you a worse one.

5. 5

   Check the output before it leaves

   Open the compressed PDF at 100% on the page with the most detail. Open one image at full size and look at text edges and gradients. Then send the copy and keep the master.

For a one-off proof, Preview is free and already on your Mac. Check the output size afterward, because it can make a PDF bigger. Why Preview’s Reduce File Size ruins PDFs shows the plist. For a ranked comparison of seven tools, see the best PDF compressor for Mac, and for Acrobat specifically, the Acrobat alternatives for Mac.

Online tools take the file to a third-party server. Some contracts and NDAs decide that question for you, so read yours before you drag unreleased client work into a browser tab.

Not with Smol. It processes files on your Mac, needs no account and uploads nothing. That is a statement about what the app does. Whether a tool is allowed under a given NDA is between you and your client.

Compression is not cleaning. No PDF preset strips metadata. In our testing the Title field survived every preset, so a document named pitch-v4-FINAL-client-B still carries that string when you send it to client A. Stripping metadata is a separate operation in Smol. For images, compression strips EXIF, GPS, IPTC and XMP by default, and that setting can be switched off. Check the output before it leaves: in our metadata test, a WebP output with stripping switched off kept its EXIF, GPS, XMP and ICC tags.

Two limits to state plainly. Clearing a PDF’s visible properties has been shown to be reversible with a free tool unless the file is rewritten afterward, so read how to remove metadata from a PDF before you rely on it. And metadata removal is not redaction. Smol does not redact. If a layer or a hidden object holds something the client must not see, remove it in the source.

Licenses are one-time. Solo is $29 for one Mac. Team is $49 for three Macs, with seats managed from an admin dashboard, which fits a small studio. Enterprise is $20 per seat for 5 to 500 seats, managed from one dashboard. Updates are free. See pricing.

The practical gain for a studio is consistency. Each Mac keeps its own presets, so write the “Proof” and “Web” settings down (format, quality, maximum dimension, PDF preset) and recreate the preset on each Mac. Then five people stop picking five different qualities.

A Finder Quick Action puts compression on the right-click menu of an export folder, as this article sets up. A watched folder can handle the folder where Figma exports land, with one honest caveat: watched folders can make already-optimized files larger, a known defect we disclose in the watched folder article. Point one only at a folder of fresh, unoptimized exports. Marketing teams receiving these files have their own page: Smol for marketing teams.

Several places, and the first one costs money if you get it wrong.

Print-ready PDFs. Presets are pixel caps, so on our full-bleed A4 test brochure, where landscape photos were cropped to portrait pages, Original left 137 PPI, well under the 300 that Lulu and 4over4 ask for. Even an image that exactly fits A4 would top out near 205 PPI at the 2,400 px cap. Original is also not lossless. Compression converts CMYK images in a PDF to sRGB, so a press-bound CMYK file will not come back as it went in; the presets article has the detail. Smol does not attach an output intent or produce PDF/X, and it leaves fonts exactly as they arrived, so it cannot fix a missing embed. Re-export from the application with the preset your printer specifies. We walk through the reasoning in compressing a PDF for print.

You still have the source file. Fixing size at export is better than fixing it afterward, because the export can control flattening, fonts and color. A compressor only works on what came out.

SVG, layered files and heavy vectors. Smol does not support SVG, and it works on exported files, not .indd, .ai or .fig sources. A PDF with no large images has little for a preset to cap. PDFs from some generators, ReportLab among them, compress by almost nothing.

Pixel-identical icons and logos. Smol has no lossless mode for images. ImageOptim at its default settings is lossless; on the 24 small test photographs it saved 8.9% on JPEGs and 4.3% on PNGs, and it will not blur a one-pixel rule.

Wide-gamut or profile-dependent deliverables. In our metadata test, a Display P3 JPEG came out of Compress with zero ICC tags even with stripping switched off, and Figma’s export default can be Display P3. Export sRGB before compressing. For other output formats, we have no color measurement, so proof the result in a color-managed app before it ships.

Speed on small files. Smol took about 7 seconds for 24 small images. A sips shell loop does the same in under one second, and the sips article shows how.