Turn the pages of a PDF into JPG or PNG images. Pick the pages and the resolution, and download one image or a ZIP of all of them. Your PDF is never uploaded.
Up to 300 MB. The PDF is opened on your device and is never uploaded.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your PDF and the images made from it never leave your device.
A PDF page has a size in inches, not pixels
PDF describes a page in points, 72 to the inch. A US letter page is 612 by 792 points and an A4 page is about 595 by 842. The text and drawings on it are instructions, such as "this word in this font at this position", so a PDF can be printed on a poster or shown on a watch without losing sharpness. An image is different: it is a fixed grid of pixels. Converting a page means choosing how many pixels to spend on each inch, and that number is the resolution in dots per inch (DPI).
The arithmetic is simple. Width in pixels is the width in inches times the DPI. A letter page is 8.5 inches wide, so at 150 DPI it becomes 1,275 pixels across.
| Resolution | US letter | A4 | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 72 DPI | 612 × 792 | 595 × 842 | Thumbnails and previews |
| 150 DPI | 1,275 × 1,650 | 1,240 × 1,754 | Reading on screen, slides, email |
| 300 DPI | 2,550 × 3,300 | 2,480 × 3,508 | Printing, text recognition, archiving |
Doubling the DPI doubles both sides, so the image has four times the pixels, and the file usually grows two to four times. Pick the lowest setting that does the job. For a page that is going into a presentation or a chat message, 150 DPI is plenty. For a page you will print, 300 DPI matches what most printers can reproduce.
More DPI does not add detail that was never there
Typed text and vector drawings are redrawn from scratch at whatever resolution you ask for, so they get sharper all the way up. Pictures inside the PDF do not. A scanned document is a stack of photographs of paper, usually taken at 200 or 300 DPI. Converting it at 600 DPI only enlarges those photographs, which makes the files bigger without making them clearer. If the PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, 300 DPI is the useful ceiling.
JPG or PNG
JPG compresses by discarding detail the eye is unlikely to miss, which works very well for photographs and scans, where neighbouring pixels are rarely identical. It struggles with the hard edge between black text and white paper, where it can leave faint speckles, called artefacts, around each letter. At the default quality of 90 those are hard to see, but they show if you zoom in or lower the quality.
PNG is lossless: every pixel comes back exactly as it was drawn. A page of typed text is white paper and solid black letters, which PNG packs efficiently, so a text page is usually sharper as PNG and often smaller than the JPG too. A page covered in photographs is the opposite case, and can be several times larger as PNG. PNG is also the only choice here that can make the background transparent, useful when you want a logo or a diagram from a PDF without the white paper behind it.
What the converted page includes
The page is drawn the way it would print. Form fields show whatever was typed in them, and stamps and signature images appear. Comment and sticky-note icons, and layers marked as screen-only, are left out. Links stop being links, and the text is no longer text: an image cannot be searched, copied or read aloud by a screen reader, so keep the PDF as well.
Some PDFs do not carry their fonts and rely on the reader to supply a close match. The tool uses the fonts on your device for those, so letter spacing can differ slightly from another viewer. Documents prepared for commercial printing describe colour in CMYK ink values, which are converted to screen colour with a standard printing profile.
The images know their own size
Every image is saved with its resolution written inside it, the same way a scanner records it. When you insert a 300 DPI page into Word or LibreOffice, it arrives at its real size of 8.5 by 11 inches rather than three times too large, and printing it at 100% gives a page the size of the original. Without that label, most programs assume 72 or 96 DPI.
Large documents and phones
Pages are drawn one at a time and each one is cleared from memory before the next begins, so a long document needs little more memory than its largest page. Browsers do cap the size of a single drawing, especially on iPhones and iPads. A page that would exceed it, such as an architectural drawing at 300 DPI, is drawn at the largest size that fits and the result tells you so.
To go the other way and turn photos or scans into a PDF, use the JPG to PDF converter. To pull a few pages out of a long PDF while keeping them as a PDF, use PDF Merge & Split. And if the images come out larger than an upload form allows, the image compressor can shrink them to a target size.
