What PDF to PNG actually does
A PDF is a layout document. Each page is a recipe for drawing — fonts, vector paths, embedded images, transparency. PNG is a bitmap. Converting one to the other means rendering: telling a renderer "draw this page at this resolution," then capturing the result as pixels. The PDF to PNG Converter does exactly that. Each page of your PDF becomes one PNG file. A 20-page PDF gives you 20 PNGs, numbered in order.
That word "render" matters. We are not extracting images that already live inside the PDF — that is a different job (more on that in a minute). We are drawing each page fresh as if you opened it in a viewer, then taking a screenshot at the resolution you picked. The PNG you get is a faithful raster snapshot of how the page looks, including the text, the shapes, and any embedded images, flattened into one bitmap.
PNG is lossless. The pixels we draw are the pixels you get. Nothing is thrown away to save space. That makes PNG the right pick when sharpness matters — pages full of small text, line art, charts with thin grid lines, screenshots, diagrams. It's also the right pick when you'll edit the image afterward. JPG would compress, round, and discard detail; every save round-trip would degrade it further. PNG holds still.
How to use it
The PDF to PNG Converter runs entirely in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your machine. Open the page, drop a file, pick a DPI, click convert.
- Drop or pick your PDF. Up to 100 MB, up to 200 pages.
- Choose the output resolution: 72 DPI for screen, 150 DPI for general use, 300 DPI for high-quality print or archive.
- Click Convert to PNG. Each page is rendered to a canvas and exported as PNG — a few seconds for short PDFs, a minute or so for 100-page PDFs at 300 DPI.
- Download individual pages with the PNG button on each thumbnail, or click Download all to grab the lot.
That is the whole flow. No account, no email, no watermark, no "click here to upgrade." iLovePDF and SmallPDF will hand you the same conversion and then nag you to subscribe before letting you do a second file. PDF24 and Sejda upload your document to a server first, which we think is the wrong default for a personal document. We chose differently: the rendering work happens in your browser, on your CPU, using Mozilla's PDF.js — the same library that draws PDFs inside Firefox. Check the network tab during conversion. Zero outbound requests after the page itself loads.
Picking a DPI
DPI — dots per inch — is the single decision that drives both the look and the file size of your output. We expose three steps: 72, 150, and 300. They map to three real-world use cases, and the difference between them is not subtle.
| DPI | Best for | A4 page pixel size | Typical PNG file size |
|---|---|---|---|
| 72 DPI | Web embedding, email previews, on-screen-only use | 595 x 842 | ~100-300 KB |
| 150 DPI | Standard office printers, retina-screen viewing, slide decks | 1240 x 1754 | ~400 KB-1.2 MB |
| 300 DPI | Commercial print, archiving, enlarged display | 2480 x 3508 | ~1.5-5 MB |
The numbers above assume a typical document with mixed text and graphics. A page of pure photographs will be larger; a page of plain text on white will be smaller, because PNG's compression eats flat color cheaply.
Rule of thumb: pick the lowest DPI that still looks right at the size you'll display the image. Going higher costs file size linearly in both directions — 300 DPI is roughly 4x the pixels of 150 DPI, which means roughly 4x the bytes.
A worked example
Say you have a 12-page contract PDF, A4 size, mostly black text with a logo at the top of page one and a signature box on page twelve. You want to upload each page as a separate image to a project-management tool that only accepts PNG or JPG, not PDF.
At 72 DPI: each page renders at 595 x 842 pixels and weighs around 180 KB. The PNGs are crisp on screen at 100% zoom but pixelated if you blow them up. Total bundle: ~2.2 MB.
At 150 DPI: each page renders at 1240 x 1754 pixels and weighs around 650 KB. The pages are sharp on a retina screen and look fine when printed on a normal office printer. Total bundle: ~7.8 MB.
At 300 DPI: each page renders at 2480 x 3508 pixels and weighs around 2.4 MB. Sharp at any zoom level you'd ever use. Total bundle: ~29 MB.
For a project-management upload, 150 DPI is the right call — sharp enough for anyone to read on any screen, small enough that the upload doesn't take forever. The same contract at 300 DPI would take ~13x as long to upload and would gain you nothing the reader can see.
Render to image is not the same as extract images
This trips up roughly half the people who land on a PDF to PNG page. There are two completely different jobs that sound similar.
Render each page as an image (what this tool does): the entire visible page — text, shapes, embedded photos, everything — gets drawn onto a canvas at the DPI you pick. One PNG per page. The text is now pixels; you can't copy-paste it.
Extract the embedded images from a PDF (different tool): pulls out the original photos that were placed inside the PDF, at their original resolution, as separate files. Text and vector shapes are ignored. If a page has one logo and two photos, you get three image files for that page — not one.
If you want the second behavior — say, you have a product catalog PDF and you want the product photos back as separate JPGs — use Extract PDF Images instead. If you want the first — every page as a flat image — you're in the right place.
When to pick PNG over JPG or WebP
PNG is one of three sensible formats for "PDF page as an image." Which one is right depends on what the page contains and where the image is going.
| Format | Lossless? | Best for | Typical size vs PNG |
|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Yes | Text-heavy pages, line art, screenshots, archive, further editing | baseline |
| JPG | No | Photo-heavy pages, sharing, embedding where size matters more than perfect pixels | ~25-60% smaller (quality dependent) |
| WebP | Both modes | Web embedding on modern browsers, page weight matters | ~40-70% smaller |
If the page is mostly text and you might zoom in or print it, pick PNG. If the page is mostly photographs and you're sharing it over email or chat, PDF to JPG will give you a smaller file with no visible quality loss. If the destination is a website or web app, PDF to WebP will give you the smallest file of the three at the same visible quality — every modern browser since 2020 has supported it.
You can also pick PNG here and then run the result through Image Compressor or Image Format Converter later if you change your mind. PNG is the safest starting point because nothing has been thrown away yet.
Edge cases worth knowing
A few things commonly trip people up when converting PDFs to images.
Scanned PDFs. A scanned PDF is already a stack of images wrapped in a PDF container. We render the page at whatever DPI you pick, but if the underlying scan was 100 DPI, asking for 300 DPI output won't add detail — it will just upscale. For scanned documents, pick a DPI that matches the original scan or undersamples it slightly. Going above the source DPI wastes bytes without adding sharpness.
Encrypted or password-protected PDFs. Won't open. Unlock the file in Acrobat or Preview first and save an unprotected copy.
Forms and signatures. Filled-in PDF forms render fine in most cases. Some signature widgets — particularly Adobe Acrobat digital signatures — can render with gaps or as flat outlines. If a page looks wrong, open the PDF in Preview (Mac) or Acrobat, "Print to PDF" to flatten the form, and convert that flattened version instead. The PDF Flatten Form tool does the same job in your browser.
Mixed page sizes. If your PDF mixes A4 and Letter pages, or has a cover spread that's twice as wide, each PNG will reflect its source page size. The pixel dimensions will differ between pages. The filenames are zero-padded by page number so sort order still matches reading order.
Big PDFs at high DPI. Rendering 200 pages at 300 DPI can use 2-3 GB of browser memory. On a phone or an older laptop, the tab may run out and crash. If the source PDF is huge, split it first with Split PDF and convert each chunk separately.
Why in-browser matters
The big online PDF tools — iLovePDF, SmallPDF, PDF24, Sejda, Convertio, CloudConvert — all upload your PDF to their servers, render it there, and stream the images back. That's not a privacy lecture; it's a description of the architecture. For an invoice or a marketing flyer it doesn't matter. For a signed contract, a medical record, a bank statement, or anything an employer would prefer stayed inside the company, it matters quite a lot.
Browser-side rendering exists because PDF.js exists. Mozilla wrote it to render PDFs inside Firefox without a plugin, and they open-sourced it. Every page of every PDF you ever opened in Firefox was rendered with the same code we use here. We didn't invent the privacy property; we just chose not to throw it away by routing your file through a server first. The 10% Pledge — 10% of revenue to charity, off the top — only works if we're actually delivering the tool, not selling friction on top of free software.
Related PDF tools
The PDF to PNG Converter is one of a set of PDF tools that all run in your browser. Some pair naturally with it:
- PNG to PDF — the reverse direction. Build a PDF from a folder of PNGs.
- PDF to JPG — same job, lossy JPG output. Smaller files at the cost of some sharpness on text edges.
- PDF to WebP — same job, WebP output. Best for web embedding.
- Extract PDF Images — pulls the original embedded images out of a PDF. Different job from rendering pages.
- Split PDF — splits a big PDF into smaller PDFs before conversion. Useful for 500-page documents.
- PDF Merger — combines multiple PDFs into one.
- Compress PDF — shrinks a PDF without converting it to images at all.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF actually private?
Yes. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using PDF.js, the library Firefox uses to render PDFs. Your PDF bytes go from your file system to the browser's memory to the rendered canvas — never to a server. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the network tab, then run a conversion. Zero outbound requests during the convert step. The Microapp page itself loads from our CDN; everything after that is local.
What DPI should I pick?
72 DPI is fine for previewing or putting an image on a website. 150 DPI matches standard office-printer output and looks crisp on a retina screen. 300 DPI matches commercial print quality and is what you want if you'll enlarge or commercially reprint a page. Higher DPI means a bigger file — a 300 DPI A4 page is roughly 4x the bytes of a 150 DPI page. Pick the lowest DPI that still looks right at the size you'll display the image.
What's the maximum file size or page count?
100 MB and 200 pages per PDF. Past that, the browser starts to struggle with memory at high DPI. For very large PDFs — a 500-page scanned book, say — split the PDF first with Split PDF or use a desktop tool. Rendering 200 pages at 300 DPI can use 2-3 GB of browser memory; on a phone or older laptop, the tab may crash before it finishes.
Why are some pages blank or rendering oddly?
PDFs with embedded forms, digital signatures, or non-standard color profiles sometimes render with gaps in PDF.js. If a page comes out wrong, try a different DPI. If that doesn't fix it, open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or macOS Preview and re-export it (File then Save As, or "Print to PDF") before converting — that flattens the form widgets into regular page content. Encrypted PDFs won't open at all; unlock them first.
Can I download all pages at once as a ZIP?
Not yet. The current Download all button triggers individual downloads in sequence, about 150 ms apart. Most browsers handle 10-50 sequential downloads fine. For 100+ pages you may want to download in batches. A real ZIP option is on the roadmap.
Does this work with scanned PDFs?
Yes. A scanned PDF is already a stack of images, and we render each page at the DPI you pick. If the source scan was 100 DPI and you ask for 300 DPI output, you won't gain any detail — you'll just upscale the existing image and produce a bigger file that's no sharper. Pick a DPI that matches or slightly undersamples the source scan for the cleanest result.
I want the photos that are inside the PDF, not pictures of each page. What do I use?
That's a different tool. This one renders each page as one image. To pull out the embedded photos at their original resolution, use Extract PDF Images. A page with three embedded photos would give you three separate image files there, versus one rendered PNG of the whole page here.
Does this work on phones?
Yes, but more slowly. PDF.js runs the same on mobile browsers — for short PDFs (1-10 pages) it works fine. For long PDFs at 300 DPI, the phone may run out of memory and the tab may crash. Stick to 150 DPI or lower on phones, or use a desktop browser for big jobs.