Remove blank pages from a PDF

Scanning a single-sided document on a duplex scanner produces a blank back for every sheet, so forty pages arrive as eighty and half of them are empty. The same thing happens with section dividers, with fax cover sheets, and with anything printed double-sided that only used one side. Deleting them by hand means opening the file, checking each page, and ticking forty boxes, which is exactly the sort of task people put off and then send the bloated file anyway.

Drop a PDF and every page is rendered and measured for how much ink it actually carries. The empty ones are listed as thumbnails with their reading, already ticked for removal, and you confirm. That review step is deliberate: detection is a judgement call, not a fact, so anything the tool wants to delete is shown to you first and one click rescues it. Three sensitivity settings cover the range from a clean digital document to a noisy scan, and the highest setting also catches a back page carrying nothing but a printed page number.

A scanned blank page is never actually blank: it has sensor noise, a grey paper cast, dust, and very often a dark band along one edge where the lid didn't close flat. Testing for pure white finds nothing on a real scan, so the measurement ignores a border margin and counts only pixels clearly darker than paper. The pages you keep are copied across untouched: no re-rendering, so text stays selectable and image quality is unchanged. It all runs in your browser, and the tool will never hand back an empty document.