How to convert PDF to JPG

What happens when a PDF becomes a JPG

A PDF page describes text, lines and pictures, and a PDF reader draws them at whatever size you zoom to. A JPG is a fixed grid of pixels. Converting means drawing each page once, at a resolution you choose, and saving the pixels. That is called rendering, and every method below does the same thing with a different program.

Three things change in the process. First, text becomes part of the picture, so you cannot select, search or copy it, and links stop working. Second, each page becomes its own image file, so a 20-page PDF gives you 20 JPGs. Third, JPG has no transparency, so the page is drawn on a white background. Keep the original PDF for anything you may need to edit or search later.

Choose the right resolution

The resolution, given in DPI (dots per inch), decides how many pixels each page gets. An A4 page is 8.27 by 11.69 inches, so at 72 DPI it becomes about 595 by 842 pixels, at 150 DPI about 1240 by 1754 pixels, and at 300 DPI about 2480 by 3508 pixels. A US Letter page at 150 DPI is 1275 by 1650 pixels.

For a preview or a thumbnail, 72 DPI is enough. For sharing a page in a chat, putting it on a slide or reading it on a phone, 150 DPI is a good default. Use 300 DPI for printing or when you need to zoom in on small print. Each doubling of the DPI gives four times as many pixels, so the files grow fast. The JPG quality setting is the second knob. Around 85 % looks clean for most pages, while lower values make smaller files but add visible smudges around sharp text.

Convert PDF to JPG on a Mac with Preview

Preview can export a PDF page as a JPEG, but only one page at a time. It exports the page that is selected in the sidebar, so for a long document this is slow. The Resolution field in the export dialog sets the DPI, and the Quality slider sets the JPG compression.

For many pages, macOS has other built-in routes. Automator has an action called Render PDF Pages as Images that can be built into a small workflow, and recent versions of the Shortcuts app can do a similar job. Both take some setting up, so a command line tool or a browser converter is often quicker.

1. Open the PDF in Preview and choose View > Thumbnails.
2. Click the page you want to export.
3. Choose File > Export, set Format to JPEG and pick a quality and resolution.
4. Click Save, then repeat for any other page you need.

Convert PDF to JPG on Windows

Windows 10 and 11 can show PDFs in Microsoft Edge, but neither Edge nor the Photos app can save a PDF page as a JPG. A screenshot with the Snipping Tool (Windows key + Shift + S) works for a single page, but it captures only screen resolution and whatever part of the page is visible. Adobe Acrobat in its paid version can export PDFs to JPEG, and the free image editor GIMP can open a PDF and asks for the resolution when it imports the pages. Without installing anything, a browser converter that works locally is the simplest option.

Convert PDF to JPG on the command line with pdftoppm

pdftoppm is part of Poppler, a free PDF library. On Linux it usually comes in a package called poppler-utils, on a Mac with Homebrew in the poppler package, and Windows builds of Poppler are also available. The command below renders every page at 150 DPI and writes files named out-1.jpg, out-2.jpg and so on; in longer documents the numbers are padded with zeros so they sort correctly. Add -f and -l to convert only a range of pages, and -jpegopt quality=85 to set the JPG quality.

# Every page at 150 DPI
pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 input.pdf out

# Only pages 2 to 4, at 300 DPI and quality 90
pdftoppm -jpeg -r 300 -f 2 -l 4 -jpegopt quality=90 input.pdf out

ImageMagick and Ghostscript

ImageMagick can also convert a PDF to JPG, but it does not read PDFs itself. It passes them to Ghostscript, so both must be installed. Put -density before the file name, or the pages are rendered at a low default of 72 DPI. Some Linux distributions ship ImageMagick with a security policy that blocks PDF files, which shows up as a "not authorized" error; that is a setting in its policy.xml file. With ImageMagick version 7 the command is magick; version 6 uses convert.

You can also call Ghostscript directly, which avoids the extra layer. Its jpeg device writes one file per page, and the %03d in the output name becomes the page number.

# ImageMagick 7
magick -density 150 input.pdf -background white -alpha remove -quality 85 page-%d.jpg

# Ghostscript
gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r150 -dJPEGQ=85 -o page-%03d.jpg input.pdf

Convert PDF to JPG in your browser with FileReshape

FileReshape's PDF to JPG converter works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebooks, iPhones and Android phones. It renders the pages with pdf.js, the PDF engine of Firefox, inside your browser tab, so the PDF is not uploaded. You choose a resolution of 72, 150 or 300 DPI, with 150 as the default, and a JPG quality of 70 %, 85 % or 95 %, with 85 % as the default. Every page is drawn on a white background.

A one-page PDF gives you a single JPG. A longer PDF gives you one JPG per page, packed in a zip. The images are named after the PDF with the page number, such as report_page1.jpg, or report_page01.jpg in a PDF with 10 or more pages, so they sort in order. Every page is converted; if you only need some of them, extract those pages into a new PDF first.

Pages are drawn in memory, so very large pages are rendered at a lower resolution to stay within what the browser can handle, and the result message says when that happened. Hundreds of pages at 300 DPI can be too much for a phone, so choose 150 DPI or split the PDF first. A PDF that needs a password to open has to be unlocked before it can be converted. For pages with sharp text, lines and diagrams, the PDF to PNG converter gives lossless images, optionally with a transparent background.

1. Open the PDF to JPG page and drop your PDF in the box.
2. Pick a resolution and JPG quality, or keep 150 DPI and 85 %.
3. Click Convert to JPG and download the image, or the zip with one JPG per page.

Going back from JPG to PDF

If you converted pages to JPG to edit or annotate them, you can put them back into a PDF with the JPG to PDF converter. The text will still be pixels, not searchable text, so keep the original PDF when you need to search or copy from it.