Plenty of places take images but not PDFs. You can't post a PDF page to Instagram, WhatsApp shows it as a file attachment rather than a picture, PowerPoint inserts a PDF as an icon rather than the page, and Google Slides won't take one at all. Turning the page into a JPG fixes all of that.
The conversion itself is quick. The settings are where people get it wrong, usually by picking a resolution that's far too low for printing or far too high for a chat message. So most of this guide is about choosing the right one.
How to convert pages on EddiesPDF
- Open PDF to JPG and drag your PDF onto the page, or click Upload PDF file. If the file has a password, you'll be asked for it.
- Pick a "Resolution". "Medium (150 dpi)" is the default.
- Under "Format", choose JPG, PNG or TIFF.
- To convert only some pages, type a range in "Pages", such as 2-4 or 1, 5, 9.
- Click Convert. You'll see a preview of every image. The x in the corner of a preview leaves that page out of the download.
- Click Download in the header.
One image downloads as a single file. Two or more come as a ZIP, so on a phone you'll need to open it in the Files app (iPhone) or a file manager (Android) before the images show up in your photo library.
The pages are rendered on your own computer or phone; nothing is uploaded.
What dpi means here, in actual pixels
A PDF page doesn't have pixels. It has a physical size (an A4 page is 8.27 x 11.69 inches, US Letter is 8.5 x 11) and the text and shapes on it are described as maths, not dots. To make an image, the page has to be drawn onto a grid of pixels. Dpi (dots per inch) says how dense that grid is.
So the pixel size is just page size times dpi:
- An A4 or Letter page at 150 dpi comes out at roughly 1240 x 1750 pixels. That fills a laptop screen and looks sharp on a phone.
- At 300 dpi it's roughly double on each side, around 2480 x 3500 pixels. That's about four times as many pixels, and the file is usually several times bigger too.
- At 75 dpi it's around 620 x 875 pixels. Fine as a thumbnail, fuzzy when you zoom.
Double the dpi and you get four times the pixels, so going straight to 300 "just in case" can turn a 20-page conversion into a ZIP that's awkward to email.
Which resolution to pick
Here's how I'd choose:
- "Small (75 dpi)" for quick previews, thumbnails, or checking what's on each page.
- "Medium (150 dpi)" for screens: social media, WhatsApp, email, slides, a website. This is the right answer most of the time.
- "Large (220 dpi)" when people will zoom in, like a page with small print, a floor plan, or a dense chart someone needs to read on a phone.
- "Print (300 dpi)" when the image is going to paper, or into a print layout. Printers want around 300 dpi at the final size for text to look clean.
Social apps resize images anyway. Uploading a 300 dpi page to Instagram or WhatsApp just means a longer upload, and then the app compresses it down again.
One limit to be aware of: browsers can only handle canvases up to a certain size. Very large pages (architectural drawings, posters) are rendered at a lower resolution to stay within that, and you'll see a note when it happens.
JPG, PNG or TIFF
JPG is lossy. It throws away detail the eye mostly doesn't notice, which works brilliantly on photos and scans and produces small files. On sharp black text against white, though, it can leave faint smudges (artefacts) around the letters, especially at low resolution.
PNG is lossless. Every pixel is kept exactly. For pages that are mostly text, line drawings, diagrams or screenshots, PNG looks crisper, and the file size is often reasonable because large flat areas compress well. For a page full of photos, PNG files get big fast.
TIFF is lossless too, and it's what archives, document management systems and some print shops ask for. If you pick TIFF, More options lets you save all the pages as one multi-page TIFF instead of separate files. That's the format fax software and some scanning workflows expect.
I send photos and scans as JPG, text and diagrams as PNG, and only use TIFF when somebody specifically asks for it.
Colours, file names and other options
Under More options, "Colors" has three settings:
- "Full colors" keeps the page as it is.
- "Grayscale" removes colour but keeps shades of grey. Useful for printing on a mono printer or making files a bit smaller.
- "Black and white" turns every pixel pure black or pure white. It's great for crisp text pages and terrible for photos, which turn into blotches.
"File name" sets the naming pattern. The default, [BASENAME]-[CURRENTPAGE], gives you names like report-1.jpg, report-2.jpg, which sort properly in most file managers.
Going the other way, and what this won't do
The reverse is the JPG to PDF tool. It takes images and builds a PDF from them, one image per page. If you're collecting photos of receipts or paperwork, the guide on turning photos into one PDF covers that.
Be aware that an image of a page is just a picture. The text in it can't be selected, searched or copied, and converting back to PDF won't bring that back. If you need the words, use PDF to text or PDF to Word instead.
And if the real goal is a smaller PDF to send, not images, you probably want Compress PDF. It shrinks the images inside the PDF and leaves the text as text.
Also useful: JPG to PDF · Compress PDF
