Convert PDF to PNG

How to convert PDF to PNG

1. Drop your PDF files into the box above, or click to browse. You can also paste with Ctrl+V.
2. Adjust quality or resizing under Conversion settings if you need to. The defaults suit most photos.
3. Conversion starts automatically and runs on your device — watch the progress bar for each file.
4. Download files individually, or grab everything as a ZIP.

What changes when you convert PDF to PNG

The choice between PNG and JPG for a rendered PDF page comes down to one question: does the page contain text?

JPEG stores colour at half the resolution of brightness, a trick that works beautifully on photographs and badly on anything with hard colour edges. Black text on white is the hardest case there is, and the result is the faint coloured halo you see around letters in a compressed scan. At 150 DPI on body text it is noticeable; at lower resolutions it turns thin strokes muddy.

PNG has no such behaviour. It stores every pixel exactly, so a rendered page of text is as crisp as the renderer drew it. That is why contracts, forms, invoices and scanned documents belong in PNG, and why a brochure full of photographs usually does not — for photographic content PNG is simply three to eight times larger for no visible gain.

Everything else about the conversion works as it does for JPG. A PDF page is a set of drawing instructions with no inherent pixel size, so you choose the resolution: 150 DPI turns an A4 page into 1240 × 1754 pixels, comfortable on screen and acceptable in print. 300 DPI doubles that and quadruples the file. At 600 DPI a single lossless page can be larger than the entire source document, which is worth pausing over before selecting it.

Multi-page documents produce one PNG per page, numbered with leading zeros so page 10 does not sort between pages 1 and 2, and delivered together as a ZIP.

Pages are rendered onto white. PDF pages are technically transparent, but every viewer draws them on white, and a document image with a transparent background would surprise most people who opened it.

What is preserved

• Every rendered pixel exactly — PNG adds no compression loss of its own
• Sharp edges on text, tables and line art, with none of the halos JPEG produces
• Page order, encoded in zero-padded filenames so the images sort correctly

What is lost

• All text as text — the output is a picture of words, not words. Nothing is selectable or searchable
• Hyperlinks, bookmarks, form fields and annotations
• Vector scalability: a rendered page is fixed at the resolution you chose
• Document metadata: title, author, creation date

What is altered

• Pages are composited onto white, which is how every viewer displays them anyway
• File sizes are three to eight times those of the equivalent JPG rendering

PNG support in browsers and operating systems

Checked on 2026-08-10. We re-verify this table every quarter.

When not to convert PDF to PNG

Do not convert a photographic PDF — a brochure, a portfolio, a photo book — to PNG. The files will be several times larger than JPG with no visible difference, because photographs are exactly what lossy compression handles well.

Do not convert if you need the text. Extracting text from a PDF keeps the words as words; rendering to an image throws that away permanently, and getting it back means OCR.

Do not pick 600 DPI by default. Lossless output at that resolution produces files that dwarf the source PDF, and no screen will show the difference.

Do not use this to make a PDF smaller. Rendering it to images almost always increases the total size, often dramatically.

Frequently asked questions