PDF to Image (JPG/PNG)

Render PDF Pages to JPG or PNG

pdf.js draws each page onto a canvas and the tool saves it as an image. Text, vectors and photographs all become pixels. That's deliberate: you can drop the result into a slide, a chat message or a web page and nobody needs a PDF reader to see it.

Scale, and what it means in pixels

The scale selector offers 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x and 4x. 1x renders at the PDF's native 72 points per inch, so the pixel dimensions match the page's point dimensions exactly.

For a standard A4 page:

1x   595 x 842 px      ~72 DPI    on-screen preview, thumbnails
2x  1190 x 1684 px    ~144 DPI    slides, documentation, web
3x  1785 x 2526 px    ~216 DPI    decent print, zoomable detail
4x  2380 x 3368 px    ~288 DPI    large print, fine print inspection

Pixel count grows with the square of the scale, so 4x uses sixteen times the memory of 1x and makes a file roughly sixteen times the size. Most people want 2x. Only go to 3x or 4x if someone's going to print the result or zoom into small type.

JPG or PNG

Pick JPG for anything with photographs or scans in it. It compresses continuous tone well, and a 2x page usually comes to a few hundred kilobytes.

Pick PNG for pages that are mostly text, line art, charts or screenshots. PNG is lossless, so you won't get compression fuzz around the letters, and flat-colour diagrams often come out *smaller* than the JPEG version as well as sharper.

As a rough rule, if soft edges on text would annoy you, use PNG.

One image or a ZIP

A single-page PDF gives you a single image file, downloaded directly.

A multi-page PDF gives you one image per page, bundled into one ZIP so your browser isn't firing off forty separate downloads. Filenames inside the archive include the page number, so they sort correctly.

If you only want page 6, run the PDF through Extract Pages first and convert the one-page result. You skip the ZIP, and you don't wait for pages you don't need to render.

When a page is too big to render

Browsers cap how large a single canvas can be. The exact ceiling varies (it's lower on iOS and older mobile hardware than on a desktop), but somewhere above roughly 16,000 pixels on a side, or a total area in the low hundreds of megapixels, allocation fails.

A big architectural drawing at 4x can hit that, and so can an A0 poster at any scale above 2x. When it happens, the tool tells you which page went over the limit and suggests a lower scale, so you don't get a blank or half-drawn image. Dropping one step is almost always enough.

Things worth knowing about the result

The text is gone as text. You can't search or copy from a JPG. Every rasterising tool works this way. Keep the PDF if you need the text.

Transparency doesn't survive JPG. Pages are rendered on a white background, which is what you want for a document but not if you were hoping to composite a logo. PNG output keeps the page background white too, because the tool is rendering a whole page. It doesn't pull out individual objects.

Embedded images aren't extracted at their original resolution. This renders the page as it looks. If you need the untouched source photograph that was placed in the document, use a desktop tool that pulls image XObjects out.

Files up to 100 MB are accepted, and rendering happens in your browser, not on a server. For the reverse conversion, use Image to PDF.