PDF to PNG

Why none of this leaves your device

Think about what people actually turn into PDFs. Passports and visas. Bank statements for a loan application. Degree certificates. Rental agreements with a signature on them. Medical letters. Almost every one of those is a document you would not hand to a stranger.

An online converter that works the ordinary way asks you to do exactly that. Your file goes to a server you know nothing about, in a country you were not told, and is processed and stored for some period described in a policy nobody reads. Most of those services are honest. You have no way of checking which ones.

This page removes the question. The conversion runs in your browser, using the image decoder your browser already has and a PDF writer that is part of the page. No file is transmitted, so there is nothing on our side to store, scan, sell or lose. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it will still work, which is the simplest proof there is.

One thing to be straight about: rendering a PDF uses pdf.js, an open source engine written by Mozilla and the same one Firefox uses. It is not our code. It is served from this site rather than from a content network, so opening this page tells nobody else that you did, and it runs entirely on your machine like everything else here. The file still goes nowhere.

PNG or JPG

• Pages of text, forms and tables: PNG. The letters stay crisp with no fringing.
• Diagrams, charts and line art: PNG. Flat colour and hard edges are exactly what it is good at.
• Photographs and scanned photographs: JPG. Continuous tone is what it is built for, and the files are far smaller.
• A long document: JPG, unless every page has to be perfect.

Choosing the resolution

A PDF has no pixels of its own; it describes the page at 72 units to the inch, and the resolution is decided when it is drawn. 150 DPI is the default and is right nearly always. 300 is print resolution, worth it when the image will be printed or read closely. 600 doubles that again and quadruples the file size with it.

Transparency is worth a word. PNG can hold it, but a PDF page is paper, so the background is filled with white before drawing. A page that looked white on screen comes out white, rather than as a transparent rectangle that turns black in the next application you open it in.

If something does not look right

The text looks fuzzy

The resolution is too low for what you are asking of it. 72 DPI is a preview; move to 150, or to 300 if the page has small print or will be printed. Rendering higher and shrinking afterwards always beats rendering low.

It says the PDF is password protected

Then it is, and there is nothing to be done from here without the password. Open it in a reader, enter the password, and save an unprotected copy first.

A page came out blank

Some PDFs are built in ways that defeat a renderer, usually very old ones or files produced by unusual software. If a page is blank here it will often be blank in Firefox too, which is the same engine. Opening it in Acrobat and re-saving usually fixes it.

The files are enormous

At 600 DPI an A4 page is around 35 million pixels, and PNG stores every one of them exactly. Drop to 150, or use JPG, and the numbers become ordinary.

A long document is slow

Pages are rendered one at a time on purpose. Doing them all at once would lock up the tab on a phone and run a laptop out of memory on a big file. A hundred page document at 300 DPI takes a while, and it is working the whole time.

I need the text, not a picture

Then this is the wrong page. Every one of these images is a grid of dots, with nothing selectable in it. Keep the PDF, or open it in a reader and copy the text out.

Free, with no account and no watermark

There is no sign-up, no daily limit and no watermark across the corner. There is no paid tier holding back the resolution or the page count, because the work happens on your computer rather than ours and costs us nothing to provide.

The files keep your own name with the page number added: contract.pdf becomes contract-page-01.png and so on, zero padded so they sort correctly. A single page document simply becomes contract.png.

If you need the images smaller afterwards, our image compressor takes an exact target in kilobytes. And if you want to go the other way, turning pictures back into a document, our image to PDF page does that without uploading anything either.