How to Convert PDF to JPG (and When You Should)

Converting a PDF page into an image is useful when you need to drop a page into a slide, post it on social media, or send a preview to someone who only needs to look at it. Here is how to get a good result.

JPG or PNG?

• JPG — smaller files, ideal for photographs and scanned pages. It uses lossy compression, so repeated re-saving degrades quality.
• PNG — lossless, larger, and much sharper for text, diagrams, screenshots and anything with hard edges or flat colour.

A simple rule: if the page is mostly a photo, use JPG. If it is mostly text or line art, use PNG.

Picking a resolution

Resolution is usually expressed as a scale factor applied to the page's natural size (72 points per inch at 100%):

• 1.5x — fine for web previews and thumbnails.
• 2x — good for printing at A4 and for reading on a retina screen.
• 3x — large files, use only when you need to crop into detail.

For a standard A4 page, 2x produces roughly a 1600 × 2260 pixel image, which prints acceptably at 150 dpi. If you need true print quality you want 300 dpi, which is closer to 4x — at that point convert the original document rather than the PDF.

Things that surprise people

• Text is no longer selectable. An image is just pixels; you lose the text layer, links and bookmarks.
• File size explodes at high scale. A 10-page document at 3x can easily exceed 50 MB of PNGs.
• Transparent backgrounds become white. PDF pages are opaque, so transparency is filled with white unless the tool says otherwise.
• Colours can shift slightly. PDFs may use CMYK or specific colour profiles that don't map exactly to sRGB.

Going the other way

If you end up with a folder of images and need a single document again, converting images back to a PDF is straightforward — just make sure to add them in the right order, because the file name sort is often not the order you want.

Try it now: PDF to JPG · JPG to PDF