PDF to JPG

How to turn PDF pages into pictures

A picture goes places a PDF cannot. It can be put in a message, dropped into a slide, posted where only images are allowed, or sent to somebody whose phone will not open an attachment. Turning one page of a document into a JPG is often the quickest way to show somebody something.

1. Drop the PDF on the box at the top.
2. Choose JPG for a photograph or a scan, PNG for a page of text and line drawings.
3. Choose how big the longest side of the picture should be. Larger is sharper and heavier.
4. Press Make the pictures, and wait while the pages are drawn one by one.
5. Save one page on its own, or Save all to get every page in a zip.

JPG or PNG, and how large

JPG makes small files and is right for a scan or a page with photographs on it. It works by throwing away detail your eye is bad at noticing, which on a photograph is invisible and around sharp black letters shows up as a faint grey fuzz.

PNG keeps every pixel exactly. On a page of text, a table or a diagram it is noticeably cleaner, and the file is several times larger. For a page you are going to read on screen, that trade is usually worth it.

The size is the longest side in pixels. Around 1000 is fine for looking at on a phone, 1600 is a good middle, and 2400 or more is for when somebody will zoom in or print it. A page is drawn afresh at whatever size you ask, so a bigger number really is more detail rather than the same picture stretched.

What is lost on the way

Everything a computer could read. A picture of a page has no text in it, so nothing can be searched, selected or copied afterwards, and links stop working. That is worth knowing in both directions: it is a loss when you wanted a readable document, and it is exactly the point when you want the text gone for good.

If you need the text as text, you need OCR - software that looks at a picture and guesses the letters. The OCR PDF tool on this site does that, also without uploading.