PDF ↔ PNG

PNG keeps every pixel exactly as drawn. Choose it for pages with small text, line art or screenshots, or when you plan to edit the result afterwards.

How to turn PDF pages into PNG images

1. Add the PDF. Leave the Pages box empty to convert every page, or type a selection such as 1-3,5.
2. Choose the resolution: 72, 144 or 216 DPI. 144 DPI is the default.
3. Press Convert and download pages.zip. It holds one PNG per page, even when you picked a single page.
4. To go the other way, switch the operation to Image → PDF, add your pictures in the order you want, and choose A4 or Letter. Move up and Move down change the order.

What the settings do

• Resolution sets the pixel size of each PNG. An A4 page measured 595 × 842 px at 72 DPI, 1190 × 1684 px at 144 DPI and 1785 × 2526 px at 216 DPI. Doubling the DPI quadruples the pixels.
• The quality slider does nothing for PNG because PNG is lossless. Only JPG and WebP use it.
• In Image → PDF every picture becomes one page, in the order shown, and keeps its proportions inside the A4 or Letter page. You can also set landscape and a margin in points.

Measured example

We converted a generated 3-page A4 PDF of 1,903 bytes with the default settings. The ZIP held three PNGs of 1190 × 1684 px, about 59 to 60 KB each and 179,487 bytes in all. At 72 DPI the ZIP was 63,268 bytes and at 216 DPI it was 357,033 bytes. Putting those three PNGs back into a PDF gave a 3-page file of 61,019 bytes with A4 pages of 595 × 842 pt; with Letter the pages measured 612 × 792 pt. The test pages are simple graphics, so scanned or photographic pages will give much larger files.

Limits

• Text inside a PNG is a picture. It cannot be selected or searched. To get the text itself, use PDF ↔ Text.
• Pages are drawn by your browser. A long PDF at 216 DPI needs a lot of memory and can be slow on a phone.
• Links, form fields and signatures of the PDF are not carried into the images.

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