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014 · How-to · May 2026

PDF page
to image.

~4 minute read Pull one page (or all of them) out as a JPG or PNG, without screenshotting and cropping by hand.

You have a PDF. You want one chart out of it, or one slide, or one page to attach to an email as an image instead of as a document. Or you want every page as a numbered set of JPGs for a slideshow, a CMS upload, a thumbnail strip. None of that should be hard, and it isn't — once you know which tool to reach for.

Three routes work. They sort cleanly by how much fidelity you need and how many pages you're dealing with.

  1. Screenshot the page — fastest, resolution-limited, gets fiddly with cropping.
  2. Use a built-in OS tool — Preview on Mac is genuinely good for this; Windows is weaker.
  3. Drop it on Formatly — best for multi-page PDFs and for getting the output sized correctly without a fight. PDF → JPG or PDF → PNG.

One thing up front: pick JPG vs PNG before you start. The choice depends on what's on the page, and the rest of the article hinges on it.

JPG or PNG: which one

Short version:

When in doubt, PNG. It's lossless. The file is bigger but nothing degrades. JPG only wins on file size, and only for photographic content.

Method 1: Screenshot the page (the lazy route)

Open the PDF in any viewer, scroll to the page you want, and screenshot. Cmd+Shift+4 on Mac, Win+Shift+S on Windows, the volume-and-power gymnastics on iOS.

It works. It's fast. It's also the worst-fidelity route. The resolution is capped at your screen's pixel density, so a "page" of a PDF that's natively 300 DPI gets reduced to 72-or-144 DPI by the time it's on screen. Print or zoom that screenshot and it falls apart fast.

Use it when nobody will look at the result closely. Skip it when the image is going somewhere it'll be enlarged, printed, or scrutinized.

Method 2: Built-in OS tools

Mac (Preview): open the PDF in Preview, click the page in the sidebar, then File → Export. Pick JPEG or PNG from the Format dropdown. The "Resolution" field defaults to 150 DPI; bump it to 300 if the output is going to print. This is genuinely good — Preview rasterizes the actual PDF page, not a screenshot of it, so resolution holds up.

Windows: Snipping Tool exists, but that's just a screenshot — back to method 1. The Microsoft Photos app doesn't open PDFs. The free routes are essentially: open in Edge, screenshot, accept the resolution penalty, or use a third-party tool.

Adobe Acrobat (paid): File → Export To → Image → JPEG/PNG/TIFF. Per-page or all pages. Resolution dial included. It's the polished version of method 2 and works on either OS, but it costs money.

Method 3: Drop it on Formatly

This is the right answer for anything more than one page and for anyone who isn't on a Mac with Preview.

  1. Open formatly.app/convert/pdf-to-jpg (or /pdf-to-png if you've decided on PNG).
  2. Drag the PDF into the upload box, or click to pick it.
  3. Hit Convert.

What you get back depends on the input. One-page PDF in → a single .jpg or .png comes back, named after the original. Multi-page PDF in → a ZIP file comes back, containing one image per page, numbered like document-page-001.jpg, document-page-002.jpg, and so on. The numbering is zero-padded so they sort correctly in any file browser.

Renders at 150 DPI, which is the right default for screen viewing and most print-on-screen use cases. If you need higher (300 DPI for actual print, for instance), let us know — there's a quality dial coming for that.

Multi-page PDFs

This is where Formatly earns its keep over screenshots or Preview's export. A 50-page PDF becomes a 50-image ZIP in one click. No clicking through 50 export dialogs. No off-by-one numbering when you do it by hand and accidentally skip page 23.

If you only want certain pages, the cleanest workflow is: extract all pages, delete the ones you don't want. Faster than a per-page export, and the numbering still makes sense.

Common gotchas

Password-protected PDFs. We can't render encrypted PDFs without the password, and there's no password field on the converter (by design — we'd rather not be in the business of handling passwords). Decrypt the PDF first using whatever tool you used to encrypt it, then convert.

Vector PDFs at low DPI. A PDF generated from a vector source (Illustrator, Figma, LaTeX) can render at any resolution without quality loss — until you rasterize it. Pick the resolution that matches where the image is going. 72 DPI for the web, 150 for screen viewing, 300 for print.

Very large PDFs. A 200-page scanned document at 300 DPI is going to produce a several-hundred-MB ZIP. We cap upload size at 20 MB on the input side; if your PDF is bigger than that, compress it first.

The page looks pixelated. Almost always means the original PDF embedded its images at low resolution. Rasterizing higher won't make pixels appear that weren't in the source — the engine can only render what's there.

The other direction

If you're trying to go the other way — turn an image into a PDF, maybe to attach a receipt as a "document" — that's JPG to PDF or PNG to PDF. Same workflow, opposite direction. Useful when the receiving system says "attach a PDF" and you only have a photo.

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