Skinny Jean

You are filling in a form on your phone. The portal rejects the attachment: "File size exceeds 10 MB." Your PDF is sitting at 40, and the file is on your phone rather than the machine that made it. Every gate has its own strict dress code. Client portals cut off at 10. Job applications want 5. Legal filings vary wildly. Meanwhile your document is carrying high-resolution photography that makes it impossible to squeeze through. Most compressors take a blunt approach: they squeeze the life out of the whole document until crisp headlines turn to blurry soup, and you get no say in how tight the fit will be. Skinny Jean is the tailored fix. You tell it the ceiling you have to hit. It takes the weight out of the imagery and leaves your type, links and vector art alone. IT LIVES IN THE SHARE SHEET You do not have to open the app. Skinny Jean appears wherever you can share a PDF — Files, Mail, Safari, anywhere. Tap Share, choose Skinny Jean, set the size, squeeze, and send the smaller file on from the same sheet. The file never has to leave the app you were already in. AIMS FOR YOUR EXACT NUMBER There is no low/medium/high toggle. Skinny Jean tries roughly twenty quality and resolution combinations and keeps the best-looking one that still fits — using the room you have rather than overshooting and throwing away quality you were allowed to keep. YOUR TEXT STAYS TEXT Only the embedded imagery is downsampled. Words stay searchable and selectable, and hold up at 400% zoom. A compressed contract is still something a client can highlight and copy a clause out of. LINKS AND FORMS SURVIVE Most tools shrink a PDF by flattening every page into a picture, which wipes out bookmarks, clickable URLs and signature fields. You find out when a client can't sign the thing. Skinny Jean puts them back. WON'T FIT? IT SPLITS. Some files carry too much to make weight in one piece. Skinny Jean divides those into the fewest numbered volumes that each slide under the gate, with the text intact — two readable files rather than one picture of a document. SCAN STRAIGHT TO A SIZE Point the camera at a stack of paper and the scan arrives already under your limit. Not a 30 MB scan you then have to go and compress — one step, one file, the size you asked for. HONEST BOUNDARIES A page of pure line art has almost no imagery to compress, so it cannot reach a very small target without being rasterized. Skinny Jean says so upfront rather than handing back a flattened page and letting you find out later. SEVERAL AT ONCE, OR FROM SHORTCUTS Choose a batch of PDFs in the app and they all go through at the same size. There is a Shortcuts action too, so compressing to a number can be a step in something larger. FOUR DENIM WASHES Indigo, Black, Stonewash and Raw Denim. Or leave it on Auto, which wears indigo through the day and black jeans at night to match your device's appearance. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE No servers, no telemetry, no account. Skinny Jean contains no networking code and makes no network requests. Your PDF is processed on the device in your hand — which is the whole point for anything you are not allowed to upload in the first place. BUY IT ONCE No subscriptions, no locked "Pro" tiers, no ads. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. If you already own Skinny Jean for the Mac, this is included. Requires iOS or iPadOS 18 or later.