About PDF to JPG
Converting a PDF to images renders each page as a picture — useful for slides, thumbnails, image-only upload forms, or dropping a page into a presentation or chat. Pages are rendered in your browser by the same engine that displays PDFs in modern browsers, at the resolution you choose, and come back as JPG or PNG files you can save individually or all at once as a ZIP.
How to use
- Choose or drag in the PDF you want to convert.
- Pick JPG for photographs and general use, or PNG for text and line art.
- Choose a resolution: Screen for web use, High for good detail, Print for the sharpest result.
- Convert, then save individual pages or download every page as a ZIP.
What resolution actually means here
PDF pages are measured in points, at 72 points to the inch, so an A4 page is 595 by 842 points. Rendering at 72 DPI would produce an image of exactly that pixel size. Each resolution setting scales it up: 96 DPI gives roughly 794 by 1123 pixels, 150 DPI about 1240 by 1754, and 300 DPI around 2480 by 3508.
Screen resolution is right for anything that will be looked at on a display — web pages, chat, slides. High is the sensible default when text needs to stay comfortably readable after zooming. Print is for images destined for paper, where 300 DPI is the long-standing benchmark for photographic quality.
Resolution costs memory quadratically. Doubling DPI quadruples the pixel count, and a 300 DPI A4 page occupies roughly 35 MB while it is being rendered. On a phone, a long document at Print resolution can exhaust memory before it finishes — convert in sections, or step down to High.
JPG or PNG
JPG is lossy and built for photographs. It handles smooth gradients and natural images with very good compression, which is why a photo-heavy page is far smaller as JPG. Its weakness is hard edges: black text on white develops faint halos, most visible at small sizes and low quality.
PNG is lossless and built for flat colour and sharp edges. Text, charts, diagrams and screenshots come out crisp with no artefacts. The trade-off is size — a full-page scan of a photograph can be several times larger as PNG than as JPG.
The practical rule: if the page is mostly text or line art and you need it to look clean, choose PNG. If it is mostly photographic, or you need small files for the web, choose JPG. When in doubt, convert one page each way and compare.
What you give up by rasterising
An image is pixels, so everything a PDF knows about its content disappears. Text can no longer be selected, copied or searched, links stop working, and screen readers have nothing to read. That is fine for a thumbnail and a poor choice for a document someone has to work with.
The change is one-way. Converting the images back into a PDF gives you a file that looks the same but contains pictures of text, not text — unless you run it through OCR. Keep the original PDF whenever the document still has a working life ahead of it.
For sharing a document that must stay readable and searchable, extracting pages with Split PDF is almost always the better answer than converting them to images.
Frequently asked questions
What resolution should I choose?
Screen (96 DPI) for anything viewed on a display, High (150 DPI) when text should survive zooming, and Print (300 DPI) for images that will be printed. Higher settings use considerably more memory and time.
Should I convert to JPG or PNG?
JPG for photographic pages and small files; PNG for text, charts and screenshots where sharp edges matter more than size.
Can I convert a PDF with hundreds of pages?
Yes, though it is bounded by memory rather than any upload limit. Long documents at Print resolution are demanding on phones — use Screen or High, or split the file first.
Will the text in the images still be searchable?
No. Rendering a page to an image turns text into pixels. If you need searchable text afterwards, keep the original PDF or run the images through OCR software.