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PDF to JPG or PNG

Turn every page of a PDF into an image at the resolution you choose, screen, good or print, with an honest warning before it becomes too large to handle.

Private · on device. Runs in your browser: your file is not uploaded. No sign-up.

One PDF file
JPG or PNG? JPG for anything photographic, a scan, a page with images, where it is far smaller at the same visible quality. PNG for text, diagrams and line art, where JPG compression puts visible haloes around sharp edges. If the page is mostly text and you are going to read it, choose PNG.

Resolution is the only decision that matters

A PDF page has no pixels. It is a set of drawing instructions, text, vectors, and any embedded images, that a reader renders at whatever size it needs. Converting to an image means choosing a resolution to freeze it at, and that single choice determines both the sharpness and the file size.

ResolutionA4 comes outUse it for
96 DPI794 × 1123Thumbnails and previews
150 DPI1240 × 1754Reading on screen, the standard scan size
300 DPI2480 × 3508Printing
600 DPI4960 × 7016Rarely justified; large and slow

The trap is assuming higher is always better. The page contains a fixed amount of detail; rendering it at 1200 DPI does not add any, it just stores the same information in four times as many pixels. Meanwhile memory use grows with the square of the resolution, which is why the tool warns you before a page becomes too large to render on your own device.

The compression difference, plainly

JPG discards detail your eye is unlikely to miss, and is extremely good at it for photographs. On a scanned page or one full of images, it will be several times smaller than PNG at visually identical quality.

PNG discards nothing. On text and line art that matters, because JPG works by smoothing transitions, and a page of black text on white is nothing but sharp transitions. The result is faint grey haloes around every letter, invisible at a glance and obvious once you look.

So the rule is about content, not quality: photographs to JPG, text to PNG. If a page has both and you care about the text, choose PNG.

What you give up

Converting a page to an image makes it invisible to everything that reads text. It cannot be searched, cannot be copied from, cannot be read by a screen reader, and cannot be converted onward to Word or Excel.

That is occasionally the point, it is one way to stop casual editing. But it is worth being deliberate about, because it is the same thing that makes scanned documents so frustrating to work with. If you are converting to images so that someone else cannot change the text, consider that you are also stopping them searching it, quoting it, or reading it with assistive technology.

Going the other way, images to PDF combines photographs and scans into a single document, and compress image will hit an exact size target if the images you produce here need to meet an upload limit.

Frequently asked questions

JPG or PNG?

JPG for anything photographic, a scan, a page with images, where it is several times smaller at the same visible quality. PNG for text, diagrams and line art, where JPG compression puts faint haloes around sharp edges that are obvious once you notice them. If the page is mostly text and someone is going to read it on screen, choose PNG.

What resolution should I use?

150 DPI for anything being read on a screen, that is the familiar 1240 × 1754 for A4, the size most scanners produce. 300 DPI if it will be printed. 96 DPI for a thumbnail or a preview. Going higher is rarely worth it: the underlying page has a fixed amount of detail, and past 300 DPI you are mostly making the file larger.

Why does it warn me about high resolutions?

Because rendering happens on your device, and an A4 page at 1200 DPI is around 140 megapixels, enough to exhaust memory on most phones and many laptops. The tool tells you the pixel dimensions before you start, and warns past about 40 megapixels a page, rather than letting the tab crash and leaving you guessing.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. Pages are rendered in this browser tab using the same engine your browser uses to display PDFs. Nothing is transmitted, there is no page limit, and no watermark is added.

Can I convert only some pages?

Yes, enter a range such as 1-3, or a list such as 1, 4, 7. Leave it blank for the whole document. Useful for a long report where you only want the charts.

It says my PDF is password-protected.

Open it in your PDF reader with the password and save an unencrypted copy, then convert that. Removing PDF encryption properly needs a full implementation of the PDF security handler, which this site does not yet have, and a tool that claimed to do it without one would hand you a file that is still locked.

Why would I turn a PDF into images at all?

Common reasons: uploading to a form that accepts only images, posting a page to social media, embedding a page in a slide deck, or sending something to a system that cannot open PDFs. It is also a way to flatten a document so the text cannot be selected or edited, though be aware that it makes the content invisible to search and to screen readers, which is a real cost.