What is this calculator for?
A vendor sends a 14-page product catalog as a PDF and you want to pull out three specific photos to drop into a social post. Or a real estate agent gets the listing flyer from the MLS as a PDF and needs the cover image as a JPG to email the seller. Or you scanned a notebook page and want it as a PNG to import into a graphics editor. PDFs are great for distribution; they're awful when you need the visual content as actual image files.
This tool renders each PDF page onto a browser canvas using Mozilla's pdf.js — the same engine that powers Firefox's built-in PDF viewer — and exports the result as JPG or PNG at the resolution you pick. It's the cleanest way to convert a single-page PDF to a shareable image, or to slice a multi-page document into a tidy gallery of pages.
Why pdf.js matters: it produces pixel-accurate renders that match what you'd see opening the PDF in any standard viewer. Other approaches (screenshotting your screen, using poppler-utils on the command line, exporting via Adobe Acrobat) all have edge cases — wrong scale, color shifts, low resolution, lost transparency. pdf.js is what professional PDF tools (Box, Dropbox previews, Google Drive viewers) use under the hood. Running it in your browser means your file never goes through a third-party server.
How to use this calculator
Step 1: upload your PDF. Pick the file. The tool loads it via pdf.js and reports the page count so you know what you're about to convert.
Step 2: pick the format. JPG produces smaller files via lossy compression — good for photos, scanned pages, anything with continuous tones. PNG preserves every pixel losslessly — better for diagrams, text-heavy pages, screenshots, anything with crisp edges. Default is JPG because it covers the most common use case (sharing on email, social, web).
Step 3: pick the resolution. 72 DPI is screen quality — fine for web posts and quick previews. 150 DPI is the standard for general printing, and what most office documents look like when printed. 300 DPI is publication-grade — what magazines and print shops use. Higher resolutions produce dramatically larger files; a 300 DPI PNG of a Letter-size page can hit 8 MB or more.
Step 4: convert and save. Click convert. The tool renders one page at a time and shows progress for long documents. Each page appears as a thumbnail with a download button. Save the ones you need; ignore the rest. The originals stay in browser memory until you click "Start over" or reload the page.
Understanding your results
Each output image carries the visual content of one PDF page rendered at your chosen DPI. The dimensions in pixels follow naturally: a US Letter page (8.5 × 11 inches) at 150 DPI is 1,275 × 1,650 pixels. At 300 DPI that doubles to 2,550 × 3,300. A4 pages come out slightly different (1,240 × 1,754 at 150 DPI). The aspect ratio always matches the source page; the tool doesn't crop or stretch.
JPG quality is fixed at 92% — the level Adobe Photoshop calls "very high" and that produces visually lossless results for most photographic content. The trade-off vs PNG is significant on pages with lots of sharp text or diagrams: JPG smears the edges of letters slightly, which is invisible at print size but obvious if you zoom in. For business documents with mixed content, JPG at 92% is the right default; for archival or document-of-record use, PNG is the safer choice.
File size estimates for a typical Letter-size page: 72 DPI JPG runs about 80-150 KB; 150 DPI JPG about 300-600 KB; 300 DPI JPG about 1-2 MB. PNG roughly 3-5x larger at the same resolution. A 50-page conversion at 300 DPI PNG can produce 200+ MB of total output — keep that in mind before triggering it.
One quality detail to know: the rendering is a faithful capture of the PDF's embedded content at the rasterization DPI you picked. If the source PDF contains an embedded 600 DPI photo, rendering it at 150 DPI downsamples that photo to 150 DPI — you can't recover detail above your render setting. To get the highest possible image quality, pick 300 DPI even if the resulting file size feels excessive.
A worked example
Marcus has been a real estate agent in suburban Phoenix for nine years. Listings come into his agency's MLS as PDFs — flyers prepared by listing photographers, complete with eight to twelve professional photos arranged on three to four pages, plus floor plans and neighborhood information. The flyer format is fine when he prints it for open houses, but when he wants to repost the listing on his personal Instagram and Facebook accounts, the PDF format gets in his way: Instagram needs JPGs, Facebook's composer wants individual images, and his Canva templates require source files he can drag in.
His old workflow was to screenshot each photo on the PDF flyer, crop in Preview, and save individually. About six minutes per listing, six listings a week, and the screen-resolution screenshots came out grainy when his audience zoomed in on a phone.
He uploads the new PDF flyer to the converter, picks JPG at 300 DPI (he wants print-quality), and clicks convert. About four seconds later, four page-sized images appear — the full flyer pages as JPGs. He saves the two pages containing the gallery photos. He doesn't love that each PDF page becomes one JPG (he'd prefer one JPG per photo on the page), but cropping in Canva or his phone's photos app afterward is faster than the old screenshot dance, and the quality is dramatically better. Total time per listing: under two minutes.
Variation: a graphic designer named Tara receives client logos as PDF files because the brand guideline export came that way. She needs them as PNGs to drop into web mockups. She converts each PDF logo page at 300 DPI PNG, gets crisp transparent-free PNG versions, and imports them into Figma. Without this conversion, she'd have to ask the client to re-export the logos, adding two-day delays to projects. The conversion takes thirty seconds and unblocks the design work immediately.
Related resources
To convert images back into a PDF (the inverse operation), see Image to PDF. To trim a long PDF down to just the pages you want before converting, the PDF Split tool handles per-page extraction. To shrink the original PDF first so each rendered image is smaller, PDF Compress can help with bloated office exports. The underlying engine is documented at mozilla.github.io/pdf.js.