When you actually need a PDF as images
Usually because something further down the line will not take a PDF. Image-only upload forms, marketplace listings, a slide you want to drop into a deck, a figure destined for a social post, or an old system that accepts JPGs and nothing else. Turning the page into a picture sidesteps all of it.
The other common reason is that you want a page to stop being editable and stop being selectable — a rendered image has no text layer, no metadata and no hidden revision history.
What DPI to choose, and why it matters more than you would think
DPI is dots per inch: it decides how many pixels each page is rendered at. A PDF page has no inherent resolution of its own — the text and vector graphics are instructions, redrawn at whatever size you ask for. That is why a PDF can look crisp at any zoom and a JPG cannot.
| Setting | An A4 page becomes | Use it for |
|---|
| 96 DPI | about 794 × 1123 px | Web pages, previews, email, anything viewed on a screen |
| 150 DPI | about 1240 × 1754 px | The sensible default — readable text, sane file size |
| 300 DPI | about 2480 × 3508 px | Printing, archiving, anything that will be zoomed into |
Going higher than you need costs you four times the file size for every doubling of DPI, and gains nothing on screen. Going lower than you need is the mistake that cannot be undone — you cannot recover detail that was never rendered. If in doubt, 150. If the images come out larger than you need afterwards, compress them to an exact KB size rather than going back and re-rendering at a lower DPI.
JPG or PNG
JPG for pages with photographs, scans or coloured artwork. The compression is designed for continuous tone and the files stay small.
PNG for pages that are mostly text, tables, line diagrams or screenshots. JPG compression works by discarding detail the eye is bad at noticing, and sharp black-on-white edges are exactly where that goes wrong — you get faint grey haloes around the letters. PNG is lossless, so text stays clean at the cost of a bigger file.
A quick way to decide: if you would be annoyed by slightly fuzzy text, pick PNG. If you need a third format later, the image converter moves between JPG, PNG and WebP.
Selecting pages
Leave the Pages box empty and the whole document is converted. Otherwise it takes the format you would type into a print dialog:
4 — just page four2-6 — a run of pages1, 3, 9-12 — any mixture15- — page fifteen to the end
Duplicates and overlaps are tidied up, and anything past the last page is ignored. Being selective is worth it on a long document: converting six pages instead of two hundred is the difference between a moment and a wait.
Why nothing is uploaded
The PDF is opened, decoded and drawn inside your browser. It never reaches a server, so there is no queue, no upload limit set by somebody else, and nothing sitting in a temporary folder afterwards waiting to be deleted.
Rendering a PDF genuinely needs a rendering engine — a PDF page is a program of drawing instructions, not a picture — so this tool uses pdf.js, the open-source engine Firefox itself uses to display PDFs. It is served from this site rather than from a CDN, so converting a PDF here sends a request to nobody but this server. That was a deliberate choice: the usual approach is to pull the library from a content delivery network, which quietly tells another company every time somebody opens the page. To be exact about it, the site’s theme does load its web fonts from Google on every page here, as most WordPress themes do — that is separate from this tool, happens before you choose a file, and never sees your document.
This matters here more than on most tools. The PDFs people convert to images are bank statements, contracts, medical letters and identity documents.
Questions people ask
Can it handle a password-protected PDF?
Yes, if you know the password. Enter it when prompted and your browser decrypts the file locally — the password is not transmitted anywhere. A PDF whose password you do not have cannot be opened, here or anywhere else.
Will the text still be searchable?
No, and that is the point of converting. An image has no text layer. If you need the words back you would have to run OCR on the images, which is a different job — so keep the original PDF if the text matters to you.
Why is one page taking so long?
Pages with large scanned images, complex vector maps or many embedded fonts take real work to draw. A 300 DPI render of a detailed page is tens of millions of pixels. Drop to 150 DPI and it will be several times quicker.
What is the page limit?
Three hundred pages, and that is about memory rather than principle — every rendered page is held in the browser until you download. For a bigger document, convert it in chunks using the Pages box.
My PDF came out blank or garbled
Almost always a damaged or unusually built file. Open it in your normal PDF reader, print it to PDF to produce a clean copy, and try that. Files exported by some older scanners and form-fillers are the usual culprits.
Can I go the other way, images into a PDF?
Yes — JPG to PDF combines any number of images into one document, with page size and ordering under your control.