Fixlark

PDF tool

PDF to image

Turn pages into pictures — for a slide, a thumbnail, a print shop, or anywhere a PDF will not go. You pick the resolution, and the rendering happens here.

In your browserYour file is opened by this page and never sent anywhere. It works with the network off.

Drop a PDF here

Or press to choose one.

nothing is uploaded — this page renders the pages itself

Choosing a resolution, which is the only decision that matters

A PDF has no resolution of its own — it is a description of shapes, and it can be drawn at any size. DPI here means how finely we draw it. A standard A4 or Letter page at 150 DPI comes out around 1,240 by 1,750 pixels.

  • 72 DPI is roughly what an old screen showed. Good for a thumbnail, unreadable printed.
  • 150 DPI is the sensible default. Sharp on any screen including a phone, and prints acceptably.
  • 300 DPI is what a print shop will ask for. Files get large fast — a hundred pages at 300 DPI as PNG can run to several hundred megabytes.

Going above 300 is almost never useful. The page is already being drawn from vectors, so more pixels only means a bigger file.

PNG or JPEG

PNG is exact. Every pixel comes out as it was drawn, text edges are crisp, and there are no compression artefacts. It is the right choice for a page that is mostly text or line art, and for anything that will be edited afterwards.

JPEG is much smaller and slightly soft. On a page of photographs the difference is invisible and the saving is enormous. On a page of small text at 72 DPI, JPEG artefacts sit around the letters and look like a bad fax. The quality slider only affects JPEG.

JPEG cannot hold transparency, so pages are drawn on white. PNG pages are drawn on white too, deliberately — a PDF page with no background is transparent, and a transparent PNG dropped into a dark presentation shows white text on white.

When you need this

  • A slide or a document that will not take a PDF. Presentation software will happily place a PNG and will fight you over an embedded PDF.
  • A preview or thumbnail. The first page at 72 DPI is a cover image.
  • Sending a page to somebody who will not open an attachment. A picture pastes into a chat message; a PDF does not.
  • A printer that wants images. Some large-format and specialist print workflows ask for TIFF or high-resolution PNG rather than PDF.

Limits, and what to watch for

Rendering is the most demanding thing on this site, and it runs on your device. A three-hundred-page document at 300 DPI will make a phone unhappy — render the pages you need rather than all of them, or drop to 150 DPI. The progress bar shows real progress, page by page.

Anything more than one page comes back as a zip, for the same reason as the split tool: browsers block repeated automatic downloads, and forty prompts is not a result.

A password-protected PDF cannot be opened here. Neither can a file that is not really a PDF — a .pdf that is actually a renamed Word document will be refused with a message saying so.