Converting a PDF page to an image trades away everything that makes it a document — selectable text, search, links, accessibility — in exchange for something that opens anywhere and can be posted, embedded, or dropped into a slide. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on what you need next.
When it makes sense
Social media. Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook want images. A PDF is not postable.
Presentations. Dropping a page into PowerPoint or Google Slides as an image keeps it exactly as designed. Pasting the PDF itself usually does not.
Web pages and newsletters. Email clients in particular cannot render PDFs inline.
Universal viewing. An image opens on any device with no reader, which matters when you cannot be certain what the recipient has.
Flattening for redaction. Converting every page to an image destroys the text layer entirely, which is why it appears as a workaround in how to redact text in a PDF — nothing survives under a black box when there are no text objects left.
When it does not
Be clear about what you are giving up. An image of a page has no selectable or searchable text, no working links, no accessibility for screen readers, and no reflow on small screens. It is usually a larger file. And it cannot be edited except as pixels.
So do not convert when the recipient needs to read carefully on a phone, when the document must be searchable or accessible, when it is a form somebody has to fill in, or when it is a legal or archival record. In those cases send the PDF.
How to convert
macOS. Preview does it natively: File → Export, then choose PNG or JPEG and set the resolution. For all pages at once, open the thumbnail sidebar, select everything, and export. There is also a one-line Terminal option using sips.
Windows. No built-in converter, but the Snipping Tool captures a page adequately for casual use, and PDF24 Creator handles proper conversion offline.
Command line. Poppler's pdftoppm is the best free option and gives exact control:
pdftoppm -png -r 150 input.pdf page
That renders every page to page-1.png, page-2.png and so on at 150 DPI. ImageMagick's convert and Ghostscript do the same job. This is the route for bulk work and the only one that is easily scriptable.
Online tools. iLovePDF, Smallpdf, and Adobe's converter all handle it in a few clicks, typically returning a ZIP of images. Easy, with the usual trade: your file is uploaded, and free tiers are capped.
A note on scope: Docento.app edits and signs PDFs in the browser and does not convert them to images. One of the options above will do it faster.
Choosing the format
PNG is lossless. Text edges stay sharp, flat colours stay clean, and it supports transparency. For a page of text, a logo, a chart, or a diagram, PNG is the right answer — JPEG's compression artefacts cluster exactly around high-contrast edges, which is what text is made of.
JPEG is lossy and much smaller on photographic content. Use it for pages dominated by photographs, or when file size genuinely matters more than crispness.
WebP does both jobs and produces substantially smaller files than either. Support is now near-universal in browsers, making it the best choice for web use — though some desktop applications still cannot open it.
For most document pages, use PNG. The size penalty is real but text legibility is usually the whole point.
Getting the resolution right
This is the setting people most often leave at the default and most often regret.
Converters typically default to 72 or 96 DPI, which is fine on screen at original size and turns to mush the moment anyone zooms or prints.
- 72–96 DPI — thumbnails and previews only.
- 150 DPI — good for on-screen viewing and presentations. A sensible default.
- 300 DPI — the standard for print, and what you want for anything that might be printed or read closely.
- 600 DPI — archival or fine detail. Files get large quickly.
An A4 page at 300 DPI is roughly 2480 × 3508 pixels. Rendering higher than you need costs size for no visible benefit; rendering lower cannot be undone, because the detail was never generated.
If in doubt, render at 300. Downscaling later is easy; upscaling is not.
Practical details
Expect one file per page. Most tools return a ZIP. If you need a single tall image, stitch them afterwards.
Watch for background colour. PDF pages are usually white but not always declared white. Converting to PNG with transparency enabled can produce a transparent background that looks fine in a viewer and disappears against a white slide. Flatten to a white background if you are unsure.
Check the file size. Full-page images at 300 DPI are several megabytes each. For web use, downscale and compress after rendering.
Crop afterwards. You usually want the content, not the page margins. Cropping tightly makes the image more useful in a slide or post.
Verify the output. Zoom to 100% and check text is legible. Blurry output almost always means the resolution was too low.
Going back
Images can be reassembled into a PDF — Preview on macOS, img2pdf on the command line, or any online image-to-PDF tool. But the round trip is lossy in a way that matters: what returns is a PDF containing pictures of pages, with no text layer, no links, and no accessibility. Recovering searchable text from that requires OCR, and OCR is never perfect.
Keep the original PDF. Convert a copy.
