PDF to JPG

Rendering pages vs extracting images — pick the right one

This is where people go wrong, and the two tasks sound identical. This tool renders each page: it draws the whole page — text, graphics, layout and all — and saves that picture as a JPG. What you get looks exactly like the page.

That is what you want for a slide, a preview thumbnail, a listing photo, or sending a page to someone whose phone will not open a PDF. It is not what you want if your goal is the photographs that are sitting inside the PDF, because rendering gives you the whole page with the photo embedded in it at whatever size the layout used. For that job, use the image extraction tool instead — it pulls each embedded image out at its original resolution.

Choosing a resolution

Three settings control how many pixels each page image gets. Web renders at the PDF's natural size and produces small files, which is right for anything viewed on a screen at normal size. Standard is the default and renders larger, so text stays crisp when someone zooms in — the sensible choice for most work. Print renders largest and gives the most detail, at the cost of file size and a slower conversion on a long document.

Bear in mind that no setting adds detail the PDF does not contain. A PDF built from a low-resolution scan looks soft at every setting, because the limit is the source rather than the render.

Converting only the pages you want

Leave the page range blank for the whole document, or enter something like 1-3,5 to take the first three pages and the fifth. On a sixty-page report where you need two pages, that turns a long conversion and a lot of deleting into one quick step. Every page is rendered onto a white background, so pages with transparency come out looking like printed paper rather than with odd dark patches.

Nothing is uploaded

The rendering happens on your own device, so there is no account, no watermark, no page limit and no file sitting on a server. A contract, a payslip or a signed form can be converted without it leaving your machine.

Related tools

Extract Images from PDF pulls the embedded images out of a PDF at full resolution, which is the other half of the job described above. JPG to PDF goes the other way, and Compress PDF shrinks the PDF itself if size was the real problem.