How to Convert PDF to JPG (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Acrobat)

The short answer

If the PDF is in front of you and you need one page as a picture right now: open it in any viewer and take a screenshot, or on macOS use Preview's Export command, which writes a real JPG or PNG file to disk. Those routes are instant, but they are all single-page. The moment you need a whole document, screenshots stop being a plan.

For every page at once, use a converter. The browser tool linked at the bottom of this page reads a PDF, renders each page as PNG or JPG at the DPI you pick — 72, 144 or 300 — shows you a preview of every page before you commit to anything, and gives you the complete set back as one ZIP file. It runs entirely on your own machine, so it sits in the same privacy category as the built-in operating system options.

Which one is right for you depends on three things: how many pages you have, what the images are for (reading on a screen, dropping into a document, or printing), and whether the file contains anything you would rather not upload to someone's server. The rest of this guide works through each platform, then those two last points properly.

• macOS: Preview → File → Export → JPEG or PNG. No install, genuinely one page at a time.
• Windows: no built-in export at all — a screen capture for one page, a converter for a document.
• iPhone and Android: screenshots for a single page, a browser converter for every page.
• Adobe Acrobat: File → Export To → Image → JPEG or PNG, all pages at once, but it is a paid feature.
• No install, no upload, whole document in one pass: the in-browser route, covered at the end.

What actually happens when a PDF page becomes a JPG

A PDF is not a big image. It is a list of fixed-size pages with content placed on them, measured in points, where 72 points equal one inch. Most of the content on a normal PDF page is vector instructions — where each glyph goes, how thick a line is, which rectangle gets filled — which is why a PDF stays sharp at any zoom level.

Converting a page to JPG or PNG means throwing that description away and replacing it with a grid of pixels. This step is called rasterising, and the only meaningful decision it involves is how big that grid is. The DPI setting is that decision: it multiplies the physical size of the page. An A4 page is 8.27 by 11.69 inches, so it becomes 595 × 842 pixels at 72 DPI, 1191 × 1684 at 144 DPI, and 2480 × 3508 at 300 DPI. A US Letter page, at 8.5 by 11 inches, becomes 612 × 792, 1224 × 1584, and 2550 × 3300 for the same three settings.

That is why the resolution choice matters more than the file format. Rasterising is the one-way step; JPG and PNG are just two different ways of storing the pixels you already decided on. It is also what makes the output fundamentally different from the original: once a page is an image, the text in it is no longer characters. You cannot select it, search for it, or copy it out of the file, and zooming past the pixel grid gives you blur rather than more detail.

There is one case where the maths changes: a PDF that is already a scan. A document produced by a flatbed scanner is usually a low-resolution photograph sitting inside a PDF wrapper, and rasterising it at 300 DPI cannot recover detail the scan never captured. You get a larger file containing the same soft edges. If the source is a scan, check roughly what resolution it looks like it was captured at before paying for pixels you cannot see.

JPG or PNG: which one should you export as

Both formats store the same pixel grid; they differ in how faithfully they keep it. JPG is lossy — it discards fine colour detail that the human eye is unlikely to notice, which is exactly why it is so much smaller for photographs and scanned pages with continuous tones. That same trick is what makes it a poor fit for text: the compression shows up as faint coloured ringing around letter edges and slightly mushy corners on thin lines, and it repeats each time you re-save the file.

PNG is lossless. Every pixel that came out of the renderer is exactly the pixel that goes into the file, so glyph edges stay hard and flat colour areas stay clean. The cost is size: a photographic page in PNG can be several times larger than the same page in JPG with no visible gain at all.

So the choice is not about quality in the abstract, it is about what is on the page and what happens to the image next.

• Page is mostly text, line drawings, charts, or flat colour: PNG.
• Page is a photograph or a scan of one: JPG — far smaller, and the loss is not visible.
• The image will be edited, annotated, or fed through OCR again: PNG, because it survives being re-saved and JPG does not.
• The image is going to be printed: 300 DPI, PNG for a text page, JPG for a photographic one.
• It has to squeeze into an email or a chat message: JPG at 144 DPI is usually the sweet spot.
• You genuinely cannot tell which you need: export PNG, and convert the few files you actually have to shrink afterwards.

How to convert a PDF to JPG without losing quality

Start with the diagnosis, because it is almost always wrong. When someone says a converted page lost quality, what they usually mean is that the page came out at too low a resolution — the DPI setting, not the compression. Re-export the same page at 300 DPI and the complaint disappears. A page rendered at 300 DPI and then encoded as JPG is already a generous amount of information; the encoder is not the thing that made it unreadable.

The fix is to pick the DPI from the destination rather than guessing. Each of the three settings has a clear job.

• 72 DPI — the old screen standard. Fine for thumbnails, quick reference, or a wall of page previews where nobody will zoom. Small text starts to look marginal at full-page size, and file sizes are smallest.
• 144 DPI — double the baseline, which is roughly what a modern high-DPI display uses to draw one logical point as two physical pixels. Text reads crisply on a laptop or phone screen and a full page still fits in a normal email attachment. This is the sensible default for anything you plan to read rather than print.
• 300 DPI — print resolution, and the setting to use when the image will be printed, sent to a designer, put on a slide that gets projected, or run through optical character recognition. OCR in particular gets dramatically more accurate on a 300 DPI page than on a 72 DPI one.

The three things that really do cost quality

Only one of these is the encoder. The first is the source: exporting a scan at 300 DPI cannot add resolution the scanner never captured, it just produces a bigger file with the same soft edges. A scanned PDF is a photograph inside a wrapper, and a renderer has nothing to work with beyond the pixels that are already there.

The second is JPG's own behaviour on high-contrast edges. Chroma subsampling and the discrete cosine transform leave faint coloured ringing around letter shapes, which is invisible on a photograph and obvious on a page of black text on white. If that bothers you, the answer is to export PNG rather than to fight the quality setting.

The third, and by far the most common, is using a screen capture when you meant to use an export. A capture gives you the display's pixel grid rather than a render of the page, and a viewer that was fitting a whole page to the window has already downsampled it. That is where most of the “the JPG looks worse than the PDF” reports actually come from.

Whichever route you take, look before you commit. Checking a rendered page at full size is the fastest way to confirm the text you care about is still legible — which is exactly what a per-page preview is for.

On Windows

Windows is the awkward platform here, and it surprises everyone who tries it. The operating system ships a virtual PDF printer, so it can turn anything into a PDF — but it has no way to turn a PDF into an image. There is no right-click entry in File Explorer, Microsoft Edge has no save-page-as-picture command, and the Photos app cannot open a PDF at all. Your two built-in options are both screen captures.

That means the real choice on Windows is between a screenshot for the one page you are looking at and a converter for a document.

One page only: the keyboard screenshot

Press Windows key + Shift + S and the screen dims with a capture overlay; drag a rectangle around the rendered page and the image lands on the clipboard, ready to paste into Paint and save as JPG or PNG. The Snipping Tool app offers the same thing with a delay mode and direct saving.

This is genuinely the fastest route for a single figure from a report you are about to annotate. It is not a faithful export: you capture the page at whatever zoom the viewer happened to display, the result is the on-screen pixel grid rather than a clean render of the page, and the frame usually drags in a scrollbar, the viewer's grey margins, or a sliver of the next page.

A whole document: the browser converter

For more than two or three pages, open the converter in Edge or Chrome. Load the PDF, choose PNG or JPG, choose 72, 144 or 300 DPI, and the page renders each page and shows previews of all of them so you can check a busy text page before downloading anything. The finished set arrives as one ZIP; double-click it in File Explorer and Windows opens it like an ordinary folder, so you can copy the pages out.

This is also the route that works on a managed work machine, because there is nothing to install and no administrator password involved. It is the reason the browser method is the default recommendation for Windows users on this search.

Free desktop software, if you want it

If you would rather have something installed, GIMP opens PDF pages through a rasterising import dialog that asks for the input resolution, brings each page in as a layer, and then exports to JPG or PNG like any other image. Set 300 DPI at import and the output is print quality.

It is capable, and it is also a heavyweight image editor being used to do a two-second job. You get one page per import pass if you want separate numbered files, so a twenty-page document means twenty trips through the menus. Reach for it when you want to edit the resulting image immediately, not when you just want the files.

On Mac and on a MacBook

macOS is the easiest place to do this, because the system treats PDF as a native format and Preview can write image files directly. For a page or two you need nothing beyond what shipped with the machine; for a full document you will still want a converter, but the built-in route covers the common case.

Note that “on Mac” and “on MacBook” are the same procedure — this is an operating system feature, not a laptop feature. The only MacBook-specific detail is the display, which is covered at the end of this section.

Export a page from Preview

Open the PDF in Preview by double-clicking it — Preview is the default viewer. Choose File → Export. In the export panel, set the format popup to JPEG or PNG; for JPEG there is also a quality slider. Save, and you have an image file on disk.

Whether that panel offers a resolution field depends on your version of macOS: older releases expose an image size or resolution input, newer ones reduce it to a format and a quality control. If you do not see a resolution setting and you need print-quality output, use a converter where DPI is an explicit choice rather than a field that may or may not exist.

Multi-page documents, and the catch

Preview's Export command is oriented around what is currently displayed, and its behaviour with a multi-page PDF has shifted between macOS releases — sometimes you get the page you are looking at, sometimes a single combined image rather than one file per page. Export and look at the output folder before assuming it did what you wanted.

If you need every page of a long document as its own numbered file, a converter that renders all pages in one pass is the honest answer, and it is one download rather than one export per page. On a Mac, as everywhere else, that pass happens locally: nothing is uploaded.

The terminal route

macOS ships a small image utility called sips, and it will convert a PDF: the form is sips -s format jpeg input.pdf --out output.jpg. It is quick and scriptable, and worth knowing if you live in a terminal.

The limitation is real, though: it handles the document's first page only. That makes it a single-page trick, not a way to process a report. Scripting around it means extracting the page you want first, which is more work than just loading the document in a converter.

MacBook note: Retina screenshots

Because MacBook displays are high-DPI, a screen capture comes out at roughly twice the logical pixel dimensions of what you saw on screen — a page filling a window can land as an image two or three thousand pixels wide. For reading, that is often perfectly good.

Capture a whole viewer window cleanly with Command + Shift + 4 and then the Space bar, which grabs the window under your pointer instead of a rectangle, avoiding the desktop and the neighbouring windows. Press Command + Shift + 5 for the capture panel, where you can pick a save location and a timer.

Even so, a screenshot is a capture of a scaled on-screen render rather than a render of the page at a chosen resolution, and it is bounded by whatever the window happened to show. Treat it as the quick option and the export options as the correct one.

On iPhone and iPad

iOS has no export-as-image command for PDFs. The Files app opens them, searches them, lets you mark them up and share them, and there is no hidden menu that turns pages into picture files. Everything on an iPhone comes down to two routes: screenshots, or a converter running in Safari.

The choice is the same as on a desktop, only more pronounced, because doing anything repeatedly on a phone is slow.

A single page: a screenshot

Press the side button and the volume-up button together — on the very oldest models, the top button plus home instead — and the capture lands in Photos. Zoom the PDF viewer so the page fills the screen first, then crop the viewer's interface away in Photos afterwards.

The image is at the device's native screen resolution, which on modern iPhones is more than enough to read body text. What you cannot control is framing: page boundaries, the toolbar, and part of the next page all end up in the shot, and each page means one more screenshot and one more crop.

Every page: the converter in Safari

Safari runs the same in-browser conversion as the desktop version, so open the converter in a tab, load the PDF, pick PNG or JPG and one of the three DPI settings, and you get a preview of each rendered page before you download. The whole set comes as one ZIP file.

Tap that ZIP in the Files app and iOS expands it into a folder of images, which you can then share into Photos, Mail or Messages — the Share sheet from an image file has a Save Image option. No app to install, and no document uploaded to anyone.

Be realistic about the hardware: 300 DPI across a long document takes noticeable time on a phone, and very large files can run out of memory. Pick the DPI you actually need, and use the page preview to confirm a text-heavy page looks sharp before downloading the full set.

On Android

Android has the same gap as iOS: the stock file manager and the common manufacturer skins can open a PDF but not export its pages as images. So, again, screen captures for one page and a converter for a document.

The extra wrinkle on Android is what happens after the download. Unzipping a ZIP archive is built into recent versions of the Files experience, but support depends on your Android version and the skin your device runs, and older devices can leave you staring at a single archive file with nothing to open it.

A single page: a screenshot

Hold the power or side key and volume down at the same time; the capture appears in a floating preview and saves to your gallery. Some devices offer gesture alternatives, which are configured per manufacturer and are not worth depending on.

As on iOS, you are capturing the viewer at display resolution and whatever fits in the frame. Crop in Google Photos or your gallery's editor, and repeat for each page — which is the point at which most people abandon this route.

Every page: Chrome and the browser converter

Chrome for Android runs the converter the same way it runs on a laptop: open the page, load the PDF, choose PNG or JPG, choose 72, 144 or 300 DPI, check the previews, and download. Everything arrives as one ZIP rather than a dozen separate downloads, which matters on a phone.

Open the archive from the Files app to expand it, on any reasonably current version of Android. If your device cannot, download the ZIP and unpack it on a computer — or, more simply, do the conversion on the computer to begin with, since the file never leaves the device either way.

The Google Drive workaround, and why it is a poor fit

You will find advice to upload the PDF to Google Drive, open it with Google Docs, and export from there. For images, this is the wrong tool. Drive uploads the file, Docs re-lays it out as an editable document — and re-layout is exactly what you do not want from a page conversion — and the document editor exports PDF or Word, not a folder of page pictures.

Getting to a JPG on the other side means adding a screenshot to two uploads. The in-browser converter is one step, and the document stays on your device.

In Adobe Acrobat

Acrobat is the answer people expect to find on this search, and it genuinely is an answer — with the important caveat that exporting to an image is a paid feature. The free Acrobat Reader displays, searches and annotates PDFs; it will not hand you a JPG.

Both the desktop application and Adobe's online service go in this direction, and they are worth comparing on two axes: how much control you get over the output, and where your file physically goes.

The desktop application

Open the PDF and choose File → Export To → Image → JPEG, or PNG. The options in that panel let you choose which pages to export, whether every page becomes its own file or all pages are combined into one long image, and where the results are written. That page-range control is the feature the free browser route does not offer, and it is the reason power users with very long documents pay for Acrobat.

Menu names have moved between Acrobat versions, and between the subscription release and older perpetual licences, so if File → Export To is not what your build shows, look under Tools → Export PDF instead. Expect the export format options to be gated behind a paid plan whichever path you take.

The free online Acrobat service

Adobe's website offers a PDF-to-JPG export without the desktop app installed. It works, and it is convenient on a machine you do not own. It also requires signing in with an Adobe account and uploading the document to Adobe's servers, and the number of conversions available without paying has changed over time.

For a public brochure that is a non-issue. For a bank statement, a contract, an ID scan, or a medical report, the upload is the whole decision — and the local routes in this guide do the same job with the file never leaving your device.

Free methods compared, and the one that needs no upload

“Free” covers a lot of different trades, and you feel them later as a watermark, a forced account, or a file sitting on someone else's server.

The honest ranking for most people is: built-in OS export when you have one or two pages, an in-browser converter when you have a whole document, desktop software when you also want to edit the images, and paid Acrobat when you need page ranges or work with these files all day.

• Built-in routes — Preview on macOS, screenshots on Windows, iPhone and Android: free, no install, no watermark, nothing uploaded. Limited to what is on screen, and poor with page order and resolution.
• Adobe Acrobat desktop: excellent control, exports all pages, but it is paid software and the menus are a subscription feature.
• Adobe Acrobat online: free with an account and a limited allowance, and it uploads your document to Adobe.
• Typical online converters: no install, and the same pattern every time — the file is uploaded, processed on their server, and retained there for a stated window before deletion. Acceptable for a public report, a poor fit for anything with your address, account numbers or diagnosis in it.
• In-browser converters: no upload at all, because the code doing the rendering runs on your own device. Same privacy position as the built-in options, with real control over resolution and format.

Why a browser converter needs no upload

This is not a lightweight front end calling a server. The entire job happens inside the page: the PDF is parsed and its content streams decoded, each page is drawn onto a canvas at the resolution you selected, that canvas is encoded to PNG or JPG, and the resulting files are packaged into a ZIP that your browser saves locally.

That is why these tools work with the network disconnected once the page has loaded, and why watching the network activity shows no request carrying your document. It is also why they can be free with no account and no watermark: there is no server doing the work, so there is nothing to pay for.

The trade-off is the limits of your own hardware. A very large document or a 300 DPI pass across fifty pages is bounded by your device's memory rather than by a queue, so a phone will cope with less in one go than a laptop will. If a conversion fails, retry at a lower DPI or split the document into smaller PDFs first.

Common problems

The JPG is blurry or the text is fuzzy. The DPI was too low, and this is the single most frequent cause of a “quality loss” complaint. Re-export at 144 DPI for screen use or 300 DPI for print — it is a setting, not a limitation of the format.

The image looks fine but nobody can copy the text out of it. Correct, and unavoidable: a rasterised page contains pictures of letters, not letters. If downstream work needs real text, keep the PDF and use OCR on the image.

Small coloured halos sit around the letters. JPG compression ringing on high-contrast edges. Re-export the same page as PNG and they disappear.

You downloaded one file and expected twenty. Multi-page exports are delivered as a single ZIP archive — the standard way to hand over a set of files in one download. Open it with your file manager, which on Windows, macOS and iOS treats an archive as a folder.

The pages are enormous and unwieldy. 300 DPI on a long document is a lot of pixels; drop to 144 for anything destined for a screen, or to JPG if the pages are scans.

Landscape or two-page-spread pages come out wide and short. They are exporting exactly as the page is described in the PDF; there is no rotation option in a straightforward converter, so rotate in the source document first if the orientation is genuinely wrong.

Frequently asked questions