Turning PDF pages into pictures
Sometimes a PDF is the wrong format: you want to post a page on social media, paste it into a presentation, attach it to a chat message or upload it to a form that only accepts images. This converter opens the PDF with PDF.js, the open-source engine that powers the PDF viewer in Firefox, draws each page you select onto a canvas and saves it as a JPG or PNG file. Everything happens inside your browser; the document is never uploaded.
Choosing JPG or PNG
JPG uses lossy compression that is ideal for photos and scanned pages. Files are small and look good, although very fine text can show faint artefacts if you zoom in. PNG is lossless, so text and line drawings stay perfectly crisp, but the files are larger, often several times the size of a JPG. For a page of text you plan to read on screen, either is fine. For a diagram or a page you will edit, PNG is the safer choice.
Choosing the resolution
PDF pages are measured in points, 72 to the inch, so a resolution of 72 dpi gives an image with the same number of pixels as the page has points: an A4 page becomes about 595 by 842 pixels. That is enough for a thumbnail. 150 dpi (about 1,240 by 1,754 pixels for A4) is a good default for reading on screen and sharing. 300 dpi is print quality and produces large images, around 2,480 by 3,508 pixels for A4, which take longer to create on a phone.
Selecting pages
Leave the pages box empty to convert every page, or type a list such as 1-3, 5 or 2-end. Each image is named after the PDF and its page number, for example report-p3.jpg, and a download link appears for every page as soon as it is ready.
Good to know
- Pages are drawn on a white background, so transparent areas do not turn black in JPG files.
- Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked before they can be drawn.
- Text in the images is no longer selectable. If you need the text itself, copy it from the PDF instead.
- The opposite job, turning photos into a PDF, is handled by the image to PDF converter.