Convert a PDF to images

How PDF pages become images

A PDF page is a set of drawing instructions: place this text in this font here, draw this shape, embed this image. To make an image of the page, those instructions have to be rendered, exactly as a viewer does when it displays the page. The tool above renders each page onto a canvas at the resolution you choose and encodes the result as JPG or PNG. Text, vector graphics and embedded images are all flattened into pixels.

Choosing a resolution

Resolution is the most important setting. Too low and text becomes fuzzy; too high and files balloon. A guide:

JPG or PNG

• PNG for pages that are mostly text, line drawings or diagrams. It keeps edges crisp and the files stay reasonable because pages are mostly white.
• JPG for pages that are mostly photographs or scans. A text-heavy page as JPG at quality 85 is still perfectly legible and considerably smaller than PNG at high resolutions.

Why convert a PDF to images

• Posting a page, a flyer or a slide on social media, which does not accept PDF.
• Inserting a page into a presentation, a website or a document as a picture.
• Sending a page to someone who cannot open PDFs on their device.
• Creating a preview thumbnail for a document library.
• Getting a fixed, un-editable snapshot of a page, since images cannot have their text altered.
• Extracting a page for annotation in an image editor or drawing app.

Things to know

Every page becomes a separate image file, numbered in page order, and the whole set can be downloaded as a ZIP. Text is no longer selectable in the images; if you need editable text, keep the PDF. Fonts embedded in the PDF are rendered correctly; the rare PDF that references a font without embedding it will fall back to a substitute, which can shift line breaks. Encrypted PDFs must be unlocked first. Rendering happens on your device, so the document is never uploaded.