How to convert a PDF to JPG images here
A 10-page document takes a few seconds at 150 DPI on a typical laptop. The steps:
- Add the PDF. Drop it on the box or use Choose PDF; add more files to convert several documents in one go. Each one opens with a thumbnail of every page and its paper size.
- Decide between Render pages and Extract images (the next section explains the difference in detail).
- Pick the pages. The Pages box takes ranges like 1-3, 5, 8- (8- means page 8 to the end). Clicking a thumbnail adds or removes that single page, and dims the pages that will be left out. First only is a shortcut for a cover image.
- Choose the resolution. 150 DPI suits screens, email and slides; 300 DPI suits printing and text recognition. The line under the setting shows the exact pixel size of the page you are looking at.
- Choose the format. Automatic saves pages that are mostly text as PNG and pages that are mostly photos as JPG, which keeps text crisp and photo pages small.
- Convert. One image downloads immediately. Several come as one ZIP named after the PDF, with each image named after its page, such as report-page-03.jpg.
The preview on the right shows the page you last clicked, drawn at screen size. The estimate beneath it adds up the likely output size of every page you selected, so a 600-DPI request on a long document does not come as a surprise.
Render pages or extract images: which one you need
Render pages gives you a picture of the page. The tool draws each page the way a PDF reader shows it, text, lines, logos and photos together, and saves that drawing as an image at the DPI you choose. It is what you want for a slide, a thumbnail, a social post, a single page to attach to a message, or a portal that only accepts JPG.
Extract images gives you the photos that were put into the PDF. A PDF made from a camera, a brochure with product shots, or a scanned document stores each picture as a separate object inside the file. Extraction lists those objects and saves each at the resolution it was stored at. A JPG photo comes out byte for byte identical to the file that went in; any other kind of picture is decoded and saved as a lossless PNG. Small images such as icons, bullets and rules are skipped by a size filter you can change, and a picture used on several pages is saved once.
An example makes the difference clear. Take a two-page estate agent’s brochure with a 4000 × 3000 pixel photo of a house on page 1 and a floor plan drawn as vector lines on page 2. Rendering page 1 at 150 DPI gives a 1240 × 1754 image of the whole page, with the photo shrunk to fit its box and the text around it. Extracting gives the house photo at its full 4000 × 3000, without the text, and nothing at all for page 2, because a vector floor plan contains no image objects.
For a scanned PDF, each page is one big image, so extraction returns the scans at their original scanning resolution with no loss, which is usually the best copy you can get. For a PDF exported from Word or a web page, where the text is real text, extraction returns only the embedded pictures, and Render pages is the way to get the text as an image.
DPI and resolution: how big the images will be
PDF pages are measured in points, 72 to the inch. DPI (dots per inch) decides how many pixels each inch of the page becomes, so the pixel size of a rendered page is its size in inches multiplied by the DPI. The same A4 or Letter page at the four standard settings:
- 72 DPI: A4 595 × 842 pixels, Letter 612 × 792. The page at its nominal size on a standard screen. Enough for thumbnails and previews, too coarse for small print.
- 150 DPI: A4 1240 × 1754, Letter 1275 × 1650. Sharp on laptop and phone screens and in slides; a good default for email and the web.
- 300 DPI: A4 2480 × 3508, Letter 2550 × 3300. The standard for printing documents and for text recognition (OCR) software.
- 600 DPI: A4 4961 × 7016, Letter 5100 × 6600. For fine print, small type, detailed drawings and archiving. Each page is about 35 megapixels.
You can also set a width in pixels instead, for example 1080 for a social post or 1920 for a full-HD slide; the height follows the page’s shape. DPI and quality are different settings. DPI decides how many pixels there are; JPG quality decides how much detail each pixel keeps when the image is compressed. A 72 DPI image at 100% quality is still blurry when enlarged, and a 300 DPI image at 50% quality is sharp but shows compression smudges around text.
High DPI grows files quickly, because doubling the DPI quadruples the pixels. In our tests an A4 page of body text came out at about 63 KB as a PNG at 72 DPI, 236 KB at 150 DPI and 606 KB at 300 DPI. While it is being drawn, a 600 DPI page needs about 140 MB of memory. The tool sets a pixel budget for your device and draws larger pages at a lower resolution with a note saying so, and it warns before a job would produce more images than a browser tab can comfortably hold, suggesting a lower DPI.
JPG, PNG or WebP
JPG compresses by discarding detail the eye is unlikely to miss. It is excellent for photographs and makes small files, but around sharp edges, such as black text on white paper, it leaves faint smudges that get worse at lower quality settings. Use it for pages that are mostly photos, and when a site or a form insists on JPG. Almost every platform accepts it.
PNG is lossless: every pixel is kept exactly. Text and line drawings stay perfectly crisp, and because a page of text is mostly flat white, PNG files of text pages are often smaller than JPG. Photo pages, on the other hand, make large PNG files. PNG is the better choice for text to be run through OCR software later, for slides with diagrams, and for anything you will edit further. It can also keep transparency: with Transparent background switched on, whatever the page does not paint stays see-through.
WebP is a newer format that makes files roughly a quarter to a third smaller than JPG at similar quality. Browsers and most social platforms accept it; some older desktop programs, print shops and upload portals do not. If your browser cannot write WebP (older Safari, for example), the tool saves PNG instead and says so.
Automatic, the default, looks at each rendered page and saves text pages as PNG and photo pages as JPG, so a mixed document gets the right format page by page. For a longer comparison of the formats, including which one to scan to and when a PDF is the better container, see our guide to PDF, JPG and PNG.
Page ranges, several PDFs and ZIP files
The Pages box understands commas and ranges: 1-3, 5, 8- means pages 1, 2, 3 and 5, then 8 to the end. An empty box means every page. The line under the box shows how many pages are selected, and a range that runs past the end of the document is flagged before you convert rather than failing halfway. Clicking thumbnails edits the same range, so you can type a rough range and then click to drop a blank page.
Add several PDFs and each gets its own page selection. They are converted one after another, one page at a time, with a progress bar and a Cancel button. Pages are released from memory as soon as they are saved, so a 500-page PDF converts in the same memory as a 5-page one; only the finished images accumulate.
Images are named after their PDF and page number, padded so they sort correctly: brochure-page-01.jpg up to brochure-page-12.jpg, or report-page-001.png in a document of more than 99 pages. Extracted images are named brochure-image-04-page-07.jpg, with the page they came from in the name. A ZIP holds everything plus a manifest.txt listing each file, the PDF and page it came from, its pixel size and its file size. Choose Separate files instead to get a list with a download button for each image.
Password-protected and restricted PDFs
A PDF can carry two kinds of password. An open password (the PDF specification calls it the user password) encrypts the whole file: nothing can show a page without it. A permissions password (the owner password) lets anyone open the file but asks readers to block printing, copying or editing.
When you add a PDF with an open password, the tool asks for it on the page, in a password box beside the file. The password is used in this tab to decrypt the file and is never stored or sent; close the tab and it is gone. A wrong password gets a clear message and another try. PDFs with only a permissions password open without asking and convert normally, just as they display in any PDF reader.
The tool does not guess or remove passwords, and it will not open a file for which you do not have the password. Converting a document you are entitled to read into images is fine; getting round protection on a document you are not entitled to open is not what this tool is for.
Colour, greyscale and text sharpness
Text in a rendered page is smoothed with anti-aliasing: the edge of each letter is drawn with a few pixels of grey so it looks smooth rather than jagged. At 72 DPI a letter in 10-point type is only about 7 pixels tall, so those grey edges are a large share of it and the text looks soft. At 150 DPI it is about 14 pixels tall and looks crisp on screen; at 300 DPI it prints cleanly. If text looks blurry, the fix is more DPI, not more JPG quality.
Greyscale converts every page to shades of grey after it is drawn. It suits scanned letters and forms, text that will go through OCR, and anything that will be printed on a black-and-white printer, and it makes JPG files a little smaller. It is not a black-and-white (1-bit) conversion, so grey pencil marks and stamps survive.
The page background is white by default. Set a different colour if the images will sit on a coloured slide, or switch on Transparent background for PNG and WebP so that areas the page leaves unpainted stay see-through. Most PDFs paint their own white page, in which case the background stays white either way.
What to do with the images
Some common uses, and the settings that suit them:
- A thumbnail or cover image for a website, a shop listing or a document library: the first page only, 72 to 150 DPI, JPG.
- Slides: 150 DPI, or a width of 1920 pixels for full-screen; PNG for text-heavy pages.
- A social post: a width of 1080 pixels, JPG at 85% to 90%.
- A portfolio: Extract images to get the original photos rather than pictures of pages.
- Text recognition later: 300 DPI, greyscale PNG. OCR is a separate step; the images this tool makes contain no searchable text.
- Attaching one page to an email or a chat: that page alone at 150 DPI, which usually comes to a few hundred kilobytes. If the person needs those pages as a PDF, with the text still selectable, Split PDF extracts them into a new PDF instead.
- A portal that only accepts JPG uploads: the pages it asks for at 150 to 200 DPI and a JPG quality of 85%, which keeps most pages well under a 1 MB limit.
Converting a document does not change who owns it. Images of pages from a book, a paid report or someone else’s brochure are still covered by the same copyright as the PDF, so use them the way the original allows.
Limits and troubleshooting
Most PDFs convert exactly as they display. When something looks wrong, it is usually one of these:
- A blank or partly blank page. Some PDFs rely on fonts that are not inside the file; the tool substitutes a standard font, which can shift text slightly. Form fields filled in a reader that never saved how they look, and content on hidden layers, can also come out empty. Open the PDF in a reader, print it to a new PDF, and convert that.
- A page is sideways. Rotation is stored in the PDF and applied automatically, so a page that looks sideways here looks sideways in other readers too. Rotate the image afterwards, or fix the page in a PDF editor first.
- A huge scanned page. Scans of large drawings can be enormous at 300 DPI. The tool draws a page too big for your device’s memory at a lower resolution and says so; Extract images returns the original scan instead.
- The PDF is really a stack of images. Many scanned PDFs are; Extract images gets the scans back at their full, original resolution without redrawing them.
- Memory on phones. A phone can hold far fewer pixels than a laptop, and Safari on iPhone closes tabs that use too much. Convert fewer pages at a time or use a lower DPI.
- A page renders differently from Adobe Acrobat. The tool uses pdf.js, the PDF engine inside Firefox; rare files with unusual features look slightly different in different readers.
If a conversion fails or you cancel it, your PDFs stay open; change the settings and convert again.
Your data
The PDF is read from your disk into this tab’s memory, read by pdf.js in a background worker and drawn on a canvas inside the tab, and the images are handed back as downloads. No request carries the file, its name, its pages or its password. To check, open your browser’s developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), choose the Network tab, then add a PDF and convert it: you will see requests for the converter’s own code from dothecalculation.com and the consent and analytics scripts every page loads, including the analytics page-view record of which page you opened. None of them carries your PDF, its name or its pages, and nothing is the size of your file. Or load the page, turn on airplane mode and convert; it still works. Our guide Are online PDF converters safe? walks through the same test for any converter.
The tool remembers only your settings (mode, DPI, format, quality, background, colour and how to download) in your browser’s local storage, under dtc.filetools.v1. It keeps no record of your files, their names or how many pages you converted, and a password is never saved.
General information about PDF and image formats. Requirements for image format, resolution and file size differ between sites, portals and printers, so check what the place you are sending the images to asks for.