How to convert PDF pages to JPG or PNG images

Converting a PDF page to an image is called rendering. The converter reads the drawing instructions in the page, paints them onto a blank canvas of whatever size you asked for, and hands you the pixels. Nothing about the PDF changes, and you can render the same page a hundred times at a hundred different sizes.

That makes the resolution your most important decision. Get it wrong low and the text turns to mush; get it wrong high and you have a 40 MB PNG that will not attach to an email. Here is how to pick.

Step 1: Pick the resolution

Inside a PDF, one unit equals 1/72 of an inch. That is why a converter that offers a scale of 1×, 2× or 3× is really offering you 72, 144 and 216 DPI. Tools that ask for DPI directly are doing the same arithmetic for you.

The default in most converters is 144 DPI, and for most jobs that is right. Only step up to 300 if the image is going on paper. See what resolution you need for printing for the full reasoning behind the 300 DPI number.

Step 2: Convert the file

1. Open the converterGo to the PDF to JPG tool and drop your file onto the page. The file is processed in your browser, so nothing is uploaded to a server.
2. Choose the formatPick PNG for text, tables, screenshots, line art and logos. Pick JPG for pages that are mostly photographs.
3. Set the resolutionChoose 144 DPI for anything that will be viewed on a screen, or 300 DPI if the result is going to a printer. Watch the estimated file size as you change it.
4. Pick the pagesExport every page, or type a range such as 1, 4-6 or 2,7,9 to get only the pages you need. Each page becomes a separate image file.
5. DownloadA single page downloads as one image. Several pages download as a ZIP, with files named after the page number so the order survives.

JPG or PNG? The short version

PNG is lossless: every pixel comes back exactly as it was rendered, so the black edge of a letter stays a hard black edge. JPG throws away detail in 8 × 8 pixel blocks to save space, which is invisible on a photograph and very visible around text, where it produces a faint grey halo known as ringing.

For a page that is one large photograph, those numbers invert: the PNG balloons to several megabytes while the JPG stays small and looks identical. PNG versus JPG for PDF pages walks through the edge cases.

Rendering a page is not the same as extracting a photo

If your goal is to recover a photograph that somebody placed into the PDF, rendering the page is the wrong tool. Rendering gives you a picture of the whole page at the size you chose, including the surrounding text and margins, and the photo inside it has been resampled. Extraction pulls the original file back out untouched. See extracting the original images from a PDF.

Other ways to do it

# Poppler: pages 3 to 5 as 300 DPI JPEGs named page-03.jpg and so on
pdftoppm -jpeg -r 300 -f 3 -l 5 report.pdf page

# ImageMagick: every page as a 150 DPI PNG
magick -density 150 report.pdf page-%02d.png

Keeping the file size under control

A 300 DPI PNG of a Letter page is 2550 × 3300 pixels, about 8.4 million pixels, which commonly lands between 1 MB and 4 MB. Three practical ways to shrink it: drop to 144 DPI if the image is only going on screen; switch to JPG at quality 85 if the page has photos; or crop the page to just the region you need before exporting.

After the conversion

Images are bigger than text, so a PDF rebuilt from page images grows fast. If you convert a document to images and then back to a PDF, expect the result to be several times larger than the original and no longer searchable, you will need to OCR it to get the text back. When size becomes a problem, compress the file before you send it anywhere.

Frequently asked questions