PDF to JPG

How to turn a PDF into JPG pictures

1. Add your PDF. Drop one or several PDF files anywhere on the page, or click the box to choose them. Each one shows how many pages it has and what paper size they are.
2. Choose what you want: the picture type (JPG, PNG or WebP), the resolution, and which pages. Leave Pages empty for every page.
3. Press Convert. Each page appears in the list as a picture, with its size in pixels and in kilobytes.
4. Download. Use the link on a page, or Download all as ZIP to get every page in one file called pdf-pages.zip.

If you change a setting after converting, the finished pictures are cleared, because they no longer match, and you press Convert again. Your PDF is never changed. Each picture is named after the PDF and the page: report-page-07.jpg for page 7 of report.pdf, with the number padded so the files sort in page order. A PDF with only one page gives just report.jpg.

Choosing the resolution

A PDF page has a size on paper, not a size in pixels, so you choose how many pixels to draw it with. The resolution is in dpi (dots per inch): a page is measured in inches, and the picture is that many inches times the dpi.

The note next to the resolution tells you the pixel size of the first page before you convert. Real PDFs are often a little different from the standard sizes: a PDF printed from a browser, for example, can be a fraction of a millimetre larger than A4, so its picture can be a pixel or two bigger than the table.

More dpi cannot add detail that is not in the PDF. Text and drawings in a PDF are stored as shapes, so they stay sharp at any resolution and you can choose freely. A scanned PDF, though, is a picture inside the PDF, and it only has the resolution it was scanned at. If a page was scanned at 300 dpi, 300 dpi gets all of it, and 600 dpi only makes a bigger, softer-looking file.

JPG, PNG or WebP?

As an example of the difference, we converted one page of text, a table and some colored blocks at 150 dpi. It came to 39 KB as WebP, 82 KB as JPG at quality 92, and 102 KB as PNG. A page with a photograph on it is bigger: our test page with one photo was 124 KB as JPG. Your PDFs will differ, so try the type you need and look at the sizes in the list.

Quality (for JPG and WebP) runs from 50 to 100 and starts at 92. Lower is smaller, higher looks better. PNG has no quality setting.

Choosing the pages

The Pages box takes page numbers and ranges, separated by commas or spaces:

• 3 is page 3 only.
• 2-5 is pages 2, 3, 4 and 5. Spaces around the dash are fine.
• 1-3, 7, 10- is pages 1 to 3, page 7, and page 10 to the end.
• -4 is the first four pages, and 8- is page 8 to the last page.
• Empty means every page.

If you added several PDFs, the same pages are taken from each. A PDF that is shorter than the pages you ask for just gives the pages it has, and a note tells you if none of them exist. A range that runs backwards, such as 5-2, or an entry that is not a page, gets an explanation instead of being guessed at.

See-through pages

With PNG or WebP you can set Page background to Transparent. The paper is then left out and only the text and drawings are drawn, so you can lay a page on top of something else. Parts of the PDF that fill the whole page, such as a photo or a colored background, are still drawn. JPG cannot be see-through, so pages are always drawn on white.

What comes out looks like the PDF

The pages are drawn by PDF.js, the open-source PDF viewer from Mozilla (Apache-2.0 license), which is also what Firefox uses to show PDFs. Fonts that are not stored in the PDF, and the character maps that Chinese, Japanese and Korean text needs, come from copies kept on this site, so nothing is downloaded from another website. (Chinese, Japanese and Korean text that is not stored in the PDF is drawn with the fonts installed on your own device, so it needs one that has those characters.)

We checked the results against an independent PDF engine, MuPDF. On test PDFs with text in several fonts, a table, drawings, a photograph, a page turned sideways, and a protected file, our pictures were the same size as MuPDF's to within one pixel and differed by an average of less than one level out of 255 (about 0.3 to 1), with the only visible differences along the edges of letters, which different programs smooth slightly differently. Highlights, text boxes and filled-in form fields that are part of the page are drawn too.

• A page that is turned in the PDF comes out turned, the way a viewer shows it.
• The text is no longer text. A picture is made of pixels, so you cannot select or search the words, and links stop working. If you need the words, use a program that reads text from pictures, or keep the PDF.

Password-protected PDFs

If a PDF is protected by a password, it is listed with a box asking for the password, and nothing is converted until you type it. A wrong password is refused with a message and you can try again. The password is used by the PDF engine in this tab to open the file, and nothing else.

We can only open a PDF whose password you know. We cannot find or break a password.

Limits

• Very large pages are made smaller. Browsers will not draw a picture wider or taller than 16,384 pixels or with more than about 120 megapixels. A page that would be bigger than that at the resolution you chose is drawn smaller, and its row says made smaller to fit the browser. In our tests a page 14,000 points tall (almost 200 inches) at 150 dpi was cut down to the limit instead of failing.
• Finished pages are kept in memory until you download them. A long PDF at 300 dpi or more, especially as PNG, can use a lot, so convert big documents in parts using the Pages box, particularly on a phone.
• The list shows the first 100 pages of each PDF. All the pages you converted are still in the ZIP.
• Cancel stops a long job and keeps the pages already made.
• A damaged file, or a text file that only has a .pdf name, is reported as not a valid PDF.

Privacy

• The PDF is opened and turned into pictures inside this tab. Your original file is never changed or deleted.
• The pictures are made by your browser, and you save them where you choose. For what the site collects, see our privacy policy.
• Only the PDF's pages become pictures. The picture files carry no camera data, because a PDF has none, but a PDF that you made from photos keeps those photos as they are drawn on the page.