October 1, 2026 · 7 min read

Make a Product Catalogue PDF Customers Will Actually Open

Nobody opens a 40 MB catalogue that never finishes downloading. How to build a price list or lookbook that loads on a phone and still looks sharp.

If you sell anything — ceramics at a market, parts to trade customers, cakes to order — sooner or later someone asks you to send the catalogue. You export a beautiful 38-page PDF, it comes out at 46 MB, and you watch it fail to send on WhatsApp, bounce off a client's mail server, and get abandoned at 40 percent by the one person who did receive it. A catalogue that doesn't open is worth nothing, however good the photography is.

Decide what this file is for first

One document can't be a phone-friendly price list and a print-ready brochure. Pick, and make two files if you genuinely need both.

The commonest mistake is sending the print file to everyone, because it's the one that exists. The second commonest is a 60-page catalogue when customers wanted to know whether you have it in blue and what it costs.

Fix the photos before you lay anything out

Catalogue size is photo size, almost entirely. Thirty product shots straight off a phone at 6 MB each is 180 MB before you've written a word. Resize each one to roughly 1200 to 1600 pixels on the long edge — plenty for a half-page image on a screen — and the whole problem disappears.

• Shoot consistently: same background, same light, same distance. Consistency reads as professional more than any single good photo does.
• Crop tight to the product. A tighter crop means fewer wasted pixels and a clearer listing.
• Cut the background out where the product should float on white — it makes a grid of items look like one range rather than a pile of snapshots.
• Resize and re-encode once, keep those files, and reuse them for the catalogue, the shop and the social post.

Lay it out so it's useful, not just pretty

• Page one: who you are, what you sell, how to order, how to reach you. Assume nobody reads past it.
• One product per block with a reference code, a size and a price. Codes make orders unambiguous and save you messages.
• Put prices in the document or state clearly where they are. "Prices on request" loses sales from people who won't ask.
• Date it, and put the date in the filename. You will send an old version otherwise.
• Keep the text as text, not as an image of a nicely designed page — it stays searchable, copyable and far smaller.

Getting it under the limit without wrecking it

If the PDF is still too heavy after resizing the photos, understand what the compressor is about to do. A lossless re-save repacks the file and keeps your text as text, saving a modest amount. Any large reduction comes from rasterising — re-rendering each page as a picture — which in Skrubly's compressor is what Balanced and Strong do, at roughly 120 and 96 DPI, while Light is the lossless option. Rasterising a catalogue means customers can no longer copy a product code, and your type will look softer.

• Better than compressing hard: fewer pages, smaller images, and a link to the full range.
• If you do rasterise, open the result and read the smallest thing in it — usually a price or a reference code.
• Sending it on WhatsApp? Attach it as a document so the app doesn't touch it, and keep it small enough to download on mobile data.
• For email, under 10 MB is a sensible ceiling, and a link is safer for anything larger.

Before you send it to a single customer

• Open it on a phone, on mobile data. That's the real test, and it fails more often than you'd think.
• Check the document properties: the author field often still says the name of whoever's template you started from.
• Check photos you shot at home aren't carrying GPS coordinates — a catalogue gets forwarded to strangers by design.
• Make sure prices, stock and contact details are current, and keep the editable source file so next month is an edit, not a rebuild.