PDF Too Large to Submit Assignment? Shrink It on a Mac

There is no universal cap on a class submission. The school sets it, the course may lower it, and the tool you submit through (an LMS, Teams, Google Assignments) may add its own. This table lists limits from the vendors’ and schools’ own pages.

The cap that matters is the one on your assignment page, so read it there first, and look at any error text the portal shows. If the page states no number, ask your instructor or the school’s help desk. Smol cannot read your school’s limit for you.

Drop the PDF into Smol, pick a PDF preset, compress, and open the _compressed copy beside the original. Medium suits a phone scan and Small suits a typed document. Check the new file’s size in Finder before you upload; Smol sets quality, not output bytes.

PDF presets are long-edge pixel caps of 600, 900, 1200, 1800 and 2400 px for Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Original, not DPI targets, so the effective resolution depends on the page size. In our own scanned-PDF test, a 3-page, 300 PPI color scan went from 5,017,560 to 266,924 bytes at Medium, which came out near 109 PPI, and a separate OCR check (not run by Smol) still found every word on that typed page. Tiny gave 55 PPI and the same check recovered 1.42% of the words. Details are in Compress a Scanned PDF on Mac; it is one file, so yours will differ. “Original” is not lossless either, because it re-encodes pages above 2,400 px.

To scan homework to PDF, use a scanner or your phone’s document scanner, build one multi-page PDF, then compress it once. Compressing after the pages are combined avoids shrinking each page twice and leaves you one file to submit.

1. 1

   Scan flat and well lit

   Use your phone’s built-in scanner or a scanner app, one sheet at a time, with the page filling the frame. A clean scan compresses better than a shadowed photo.
2. 2

   Put every page in one PDF

   Most scanner apps do this for you. On a Mac, Preview can combine PDFs. Smol does not merge, split or edit PDFs, so combine first.
3. 3

   Drop the PDF into Smol

   Drag the file onto the window, choose the PDF operation, and pick Medium for handwriting or Small for typed pages.
4. 4

   Compress and check the copy

   Smol writes name_compressed.pdf next to the original by default. Check the size in Finder and flip through every page.
5. 5

   Submit the compressed copy

   Upload the _compressed file. If it is still over the cap, go one preset down and compress the original again.

For long courses, our guide to PDFs that are too big to upload covers the same problem for portals beyond class work, and batch compressing PDFs helps when a semester of problem sets needs one pass.

A presentation video too large to upload needs fewer pixels and a lower quality setting. In Smol, compress the video to MP4 with H.264 at the Web quality label, optionally reduce the resolution, then check the size against your portal’s cap, since Smol does not target a byte count for video.

• Microsoft Teams allows 500 MB per resource, so a recording under that is fine there; a school that caps Blackboard at 500 MB (as one does) is the same limit.
• H.265 is Smol’s default, but H.264 is the safer pick for a submission because an older device or grader may not play H.265. Check that the file plays before you upload.
• Screen recordings shrink more than camera footage; see how to compress a Mac screen recording.
• If the portal rejects large video outright, a link to the video (a school-approved host) may be accepted. Ask your instructor.

For the course-platform side, see our page for teachers, schools and universities, the guide for a thesis or dissertation PDF, and the video-for-email guide for the same trade-offs in a smaller size.

Export the deck to PDF, then compress the PDF with the Small preset. Most of a deck’s weight is usually photos and embedded video, so check the size of the PDF export first; Small then lowers the pixels in what is left. Look through every slide afterward.

If you must submit the presentation file itself, shrink the pictures inside it first, or compress the PowerPoint on a Mac with the steps in that post. A presentation converted to Google Slides can be up to 100 MB, per Google Drive help, so a very large deck may need a smaller export anyway.

Free and built-in options come first. Try them if the file is small enough to be fixed that way.

The Acrobat alternatives for Mac and iLovePDF alternatives pages compare the options in detail. Privacy matters for coursework: with Smol nothing is uploaded, and there is no account.

Turnitin sets its own file limit, and your school’s learning platform may set a lower one on top of it. Read the limit on the submission screen or in Turnitin’s help guide for your account type, then compress the PDF until it passes and check the final file.

Compressing a PDF changes images, not words. Typed text stays text in a text-based PDF, but a scanned page is only a picture of text, so a low preset can make it hard to read. Hand in a typed PDF where your instructor allows it, and keep a high enough preset on scans that every line stays legible.

Smol does not fit every submission problem.

• You need to merge, split, sign, fill, OCR or redact a PDF. Smol does none of these, so use Preview for merging and a separate tool for OCR.
• Your PDF is a text document that is already 200 KB. Some PDF generators produce files that compress by almost nothing; check the new size before relying on it.
• You are on Windows, a Chromebook or an iPad. Smol is macOS only (macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or later on Intel).
• Your instructor requires a minimum resolution, such as 300 PPI for a figure. Presets cap pixels, so they will lower it; keep the original for that file.
• You must hit an exact byte size on a video. Smol sets quality and resolution, not output bytes.

Smol is one payment, $29 for one Mac, with a Team plan of $49 for three Macs if you share with classmates in a study group or lab. There is no student discount and no free trial.