Convert PDF pages to JPG images

How to convert PDF to JPG

1. Add your PDF. Drag the file onto the drop zone. Every page is rendered to a preview thumbnail so you can pick out the ones you want.
2. Choose format and resolution. Pick JPG for photos and scans or PNG for diagrams and screenshots, then set the DPI. 150 DPI suits screens, 300 DPI suits printing.
3. Select pages. Convert every page, or click individual thumbnails to export only the ones you need.
4. Download. Save a single image, or download all the selected pages together as a ZIP archive.

JPG or PNG — which should you pick?

The two formats fail in opposite ways, and choosing wrongly is the most common reason people are disappointed with the output.

JPG uses lossy compression tuned for photographs. It handles gradients and scanned paper beautifully and produces small files. It is poor at hard edges: sharp black text on white can pick up faint smudging around the letters, especially at lower quality settings.

PNG is lossless. Text, line art, charts and screenshots come out pixel-perfect with no artefacts at all. The cost is file size — a PNG of a text page can easily be five times the size of the JPG equivalent.

A simple rule that gets it right nearly every time: if the page is a photograph or a scan of one, use JPG. If the page is text, a diagram, a chart or a screenshot, use PNG.

Choosing the right DPI

DPI controls how many pixels each page is rendered at. Higher looks better and produces much larger files — doubling the DPI roughly quadruples the pixel count.

• 72-96 DPI — thumbnails and previews. A page comes out around 800px tall.
• 150 DPI — the sensible default for anything viewed on screen, including social media and documents embedded in slides.
• 300 DPI — print quality. Use this if the image will be printed at full page size or if someone will run OCR on it later.
• 600 DPI — archival scans and fine detail. Files get big quickly; only worth it when you genuinely need to zoom in.

Why rendering locally is faster than uploading

Converting a PDF to images is one of the few cases where doing the work in your browser is not just more private but usually quicker. A 40-page document might be 30MB. Uploading that, waiting in a processing queue, and downloading a ZIP of images back can easily take a couple of minutes on a normal connection.

Your browser already contains a full PDF rendering engine — the same one it uses to display PDFs in a tab. This tool drives that engine directly, so pages render at local speed with no round trip. Everything after the initial page load works offline.

What people use PDF-to-image for

The need is nearly always that something downstream does not accept PDFs:

• Posting a page to Instagram, WhatsApp or a forum that only takes images.
• Dropping a page into a slide deck or document without embedding the whole PDF.
• Extracting a figure, chart or map from a report to reuse elsewhere.
• Producing an image to run through an OCR service that will not take PDFs.
• Making thumbnail previews of a document for a website.

Frequently asked questions