Press Kit File Size: How to Shrink Kits That Bounce or Stall

Plan for 18 MB or less per email, and use a link for anything bigger. Email limits apply to the whole message, and the attachment is encoded before it travels, which makes it larger than the file on your disk.

Newsroom filters and corporate gateways can set tighter caps than these defaults, so note any bounce from a desk you pitch often. Our email PDF guide measured encoding at 36.8%, which is why it recommends 18 MB for a 25 MB cap and 7 MB when you do not know the recipient.

Embedded photos make a media kit PDF large, not the text. A layout exported from a design tool keeps full-resolution images on every page, so a 12-page kit can pass 50 MB while holding a few hundred words.

Smol has five PDF presets: Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Original. They are long-edge pixel caps of 600, 900, 1200, 1800 and 2400 px, with JPEG quality of roughly 25, 45, 60, 75 and 88, not DPI targets. Effective resolution depends on the page size, and Original is not lossless: it re-encodes and resamples above 2,400 px. For a kit that goes to a journalist who will read it on screen, Small is the email preset and Medium keeps photos cleaner. Large and Original suit a kit someone may print; see compressing a PDF for print for what that costs.

How much a PDF shrinks depends on how it was made. Exports from design tools usually compress well; some generators barely shrink at all. Open the output, scroll the photo pages, and read the new size every time. The background on why layouts balloon is in why your InDesign PDF export is 50 MB, and the preset behavior is in what the presets actually do.

Send two sizes: a web version around 2000 px on the long edge for editors who paste into a CMS, and a print version only on request. The right pixel count depends on where the photo runs, so ask the desk if it matters.

The arithmetic helps you choose. An iPhone frame at 4032 × 3024 is about 12 million pixels; fitting it inside 2000 px keeps about a quarter of them. A full-page 8 × 10 inch print at 300 PPI needs 2400 × 3000 px,. Everything beyond what the use needs is bytes the reader does not use.

JPEG is the safe format for photos. HEIC photos from an iPhone need to be JPG before they go to a reporter on Windows; use Compress with the output set to JPG, not Convert, because Convert ignores quality and writes a large file. See converting HEIC to JPG on a Mac.

Quality 75 is Smol’s default and 80 is where we would start for photos with smooth gradients, such as studio portraits. On 24 small test photos, default-setting JPEGs came out 69.3% smaller. Those images are 768 × 512 film photographs and a camera file will behave differently; the method is on the benchmark page.

Image metadata stripping is on by default, and it removes EXIF, GPS, IPTC and XMP, which includes copyright and contact fields. If you want photographer credit to travel inside the file, switch that off or credit in the filename and the caption sheet. The folder-level details are in batch-stripping metadata.

1. 1

   Collect the final assets in one folder

   Media kit PDF, photos, logos, fact sheet. Keep the originals; Smol writes a copy with a _compressed suffix by default.

2. 2

   Drag the folder into Smol

   Mixed batches are fine. The PDF and the images go in together.

3. 3

   Set the PDF to Small and the images to JPG, quality 80, max 2000

   Use the table above and raise the dimension for the print set.

4. 4

   Run it and read the per-file sizes

   Smol shows size before and after per file. Add the outputs up: if the total is over 18 MB, switch to a link.

5. 5

   Open the PDF and two photos at full size

   Check headline text, logos and faces. If a photo looks soft, rerun that one at a higher quality or size.

6. 6

   Send the kit

   Under 18 MB, attach it. Over, upload the compressed copies to your shared drive and send the link.

A press kit download is too large when the zip holds originals. A reader on a phone or hotel Wi-Fi may give up on a slow download. Cut the zip in two: a small web kit and a separate print kit.

• Put a web-sized kit first: Small PDF, 2000 px photos, logos.
• Link the print-resolution photos separately, labeled as such.
• List each file’s size next to its link so no one clicks blind.
• If a page hosts the kit, resize images to the pixel width the page shows. Our compress images for web page covers that.
• Pitching by email? Send a short note with a link, then the files on request. For related teams, see Smol for marketing teams and newsroom CMS images.

Video clips and B-roll make kits heavy. Smol compresses video, but it has no size target for it: you set codec, quality and width and check the output. See how to compress a video small enough to email.

Sizes and tools aside, see the Smol versus TinyPNG comparison if your team uploads press images to a web compressor today, and the best PDF compressor for Mac for the PDF side.

• You need a lossless image. Smol always re-encodes images; ImageOptim is the lossless option.
• You need to edit, sign, merge or split the media kit PDF, or redact names from it. Smol does none of these.
• You need an exact byte target for a wire service upload. Smol sets quality and pixels, not output bytes, so check the result against that service’s own limit.
• Your team is on Windows. Smol is macOS only.
• You need SVG logos or a vector pack. Smol does not write SVG.

For a communications team

Smol is $29 once for one Mac, $49 once for three Macs, or $20 per seat once for 5 to 500 seats. Presets live on each Mac, so write your agreed settings in the style guide and recreate them per seat.