How to convert PDF pages to images
- Add a PDF by clicking the dashed box or dragging the file onto it.
- Pick a scale factor: 1x (72 DPI), 2x (144 DPI, the default) or 3x (216 DPI). Higher means more pixels, sharper detail and bigger files.
- Pick a format: JPEG for smaller files and photos, PNG for crisp text and line art.
- Press Convert. Every page is rendered in turn; the progress bar shows how far it has got.
- Download: a thumbnail appears for each page. Click the "Page N" button under a thumbnail to save it as
page-N.jpgorpage-N.png.
How the conversion works
The page uses PDF.js, the open-source PDF engine that Mozilla also uses for Firefox's built-in viewer. PDF.js parses your file in a background worker, then each page is drawn onto an HTML canvas at the chosen scale on a white background. The canvas is encoded as JPEG (at quality 0.92) or PNG, and the image stays in the page's memory for the preview and the download link. Nothing is uploaded; closing the tab discards the images.
The DPI figures follow from how PDF measures pages: in points, 72 to the inch. At 1x one point becomes one pixel, which is 72 pixels per inch of paper; 2x gives 144 and 3x gives 216. Pages stored with a rotation are rendered the way they appear in a viewer. The resulting pixel sizes for the two most common paper formats are:
| Page size | 1x (72 DPI) | 2x (144 DPI) | 3x (216 DPI) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A4 portrait | 595 × 841 px | 1190 × 1683 px | 1785 × 2525 px |
| US Letter portrait | 612 × 792 px | 1224 × 1584 px | 1836 × 2376 px |
Choosing settings
- 1x suits thumbnails, previews and quick sharing in chat apps.
- 2x is right for most screens, documents and slides – text stays legible on phones and laptops.
- 3x helps when you need to zoom into detail, print at a reduced size or run the image through text recognition. OCR engines such as Tesseract recommend around 300 DPI, so 3x is the best choice here for that purpose.
- JPEG or PNG: JPEG keeps scans and photos small but can leave faint smudges around sharp letters. PNG is lossless, ideal for diagrams, charts and text pages, and larger for photos.
Our guide to choosing the right resolution for PDF images goes deeper, including print sizes and memory use.
Popular uses
- Putting a page or chart into a slide deck, a document or a social media post.
- Sharing a single page in a chat app that previews images but not PDFs.
- Uploading to forms that accept only images, such as a certificate for an online application.
- Creating preview images for a document library or a website.
Limitations and alternatives
- Every page is converted. For a few pages of a long document, cut them out first with Split PDF – faster and lighter on memory.
- No "download all" or ZIP. Each page has its own download button.
- 216 DPI is the maximum. For 300 DPI or more, the free Poppler utility can do it on a computer:
pdftoppm -jpeg -r 300 input.pdf page. - Memory: pixels grow with the square of the scale, and all rendered pages stay in memory. Long documents at 3x can exhaust a phone; use 2x or convert in parts. Very large pages such as posters may exceed the browser's canvas limits.
- Images are not text. The output cannot be searched or copied from; use PDF to Text for that.
- Password-protected PDFs are not supported. Some PDFs with Chinese, Japanese or Korean text that rely on fonts not embedded in the file may render with missing characters, because this page does not load PDF.js's optional character-map files.
Frequently asked questions
What DPI does each scale option correspond to?
1x is 72 DPI, 2x is 144 DPI and 3x is 216 DPI. An A4 page becomes 595 × 841, 1190 × 1683 or 1785 × 2525 pixels respectively.
Should I choose JPG or PNG?
Choose JPEG for scans and photos, where it produces much smaller files. Choose PNG for pages that are mostly text, charts or diagrams, because it keeps edges perfectly sharp.
Can I convert only some pages?
The converter always renders every page. Extract the pages you need with Split PDF first, then convert the smaller file.
How do I download all pages at once?
There is no ZIP download. Each page has its own "Page N" button under its thumbnail, and each click saves one image.
Why does the image look blurry when I zoom in or print it?
It has too few pixels for that size. Convert again at 3x, or for professional printing use a desktop tool that renders at 300 DPI or more.
Are my PDFs uploaded?
No. PDF.js renders the pages inside your browser, and the images are created and saved on your device.
Can I turn the images back into a PDF?
Yes, with JPG to PDF. The pages will be pictures, so the text is no longer selectable, and each page takes the pixel size of its image.
Related tools
- JPG to PDFCombine images back into a single PDF.
- PDF to TextExtract the text instead of a picture of it.
- Split PDFKeep only the pages you want to convert.
- Compress PDFTry a lossless size reduction first.
Further reading: PDF to image: choosing the right resolution (DPI).