How to turn PDF pages into images: JPG or PNG?

Some places will not take a PDF: an upload form that only accepts images, a social media post, a slide in a presentation, a chat app that shows images inline. Turning the page into a picture solves it. The choice of format and resolution decides whether the result looks crisp or blurry.

JPG or PNG?

• JPG suits pages that are mostly photographs — brochures, magazines, scanned photos. Files are small, and the slight softening of lossy compression is hard to see on photos.
• PNG suits pages of text, diagrams, charts and line drawings. It is lossless, so edges stay sharp. It can also keep a transparent background where the PDF draws nothing, which is useful for logos and diagrams placed on coloured slides.

For a typical document page — mostly text — PNG looks clearly better and JPG is clearly smaller. If the image is going somewhere with a strict file size limit, JPG is often the practical choice.

Convert step by step

1. Add the PDF to PDF to JPG or PDF to PNG.
2. Choose a resolution.
3. Press Convert and watch the page thumbnails appear.
4. Download a single page, or all of them as a ZIP.

Pages are drawn by the same engine browsers use to display PDFs, in your own browser; the document is not uploaded.

Choosing a resolution

In PDF to JPG, the settings correspond roughly to:

• Screen (1×) — for viewing on a display, sharing in chats and posting online.
• Print (2×) — about 150 dots per inch on an A4 page; good for zooming in or for printing.
• High (3×) — about 220 dots per inch; for maps, technical drawings and fine print.

Higher resolutions make bigger files and use more memory, so long documents at the highest setting can be slow on a phone. Convert only the pages you need at high resolution.

A page or a picture from the page?

Converting renders the whole page, text and margins included. If you want a single photo that sits on the page — a product image in a catalogue, a figure in a report — Extract Images From PDF pulls out the embedded picture itself, at its own resolution and without the surrounding text.

Things to know about the result

• The text becomes part of the picture. It cannot be selected, searched or copied. Keep the PDF for that.
• JPG has no transparency, so any transparent areas become white.
• A transparent PNG may still look white — many PDFs draw their own white page background, and transparency only shows where the document draws nothing.

Getting the size down

If an upload form limits the file size, convert at Screen resolution first. If it is still too large, run the image through Compress Image, which shows the estimated size as you adjust the quality. For text pages, check that the smallest print is still readable after compressing.

Sharing a multi-page document as images

Converting every page of a long document to images makes it heavier and harder to read than the PDF. For anything over a few pages, send the PDF where you can, and use images only for the page or two that need to appear inline.