PDF to JPG: Which Resolution to Pick, and When PNG Wins
Gizke Team · Published · Reading time: 1 minute
Open PDF to JPG, drop in the PDF, tick the pages you want, pick 150 dpi for anything shown on a screen or 300 dpi for printing, and download. The pages are drawn by your browser, so the document never leaves your computer.
What dpi actually means here
A PDF page has a physical size, not a pixel size. Dpi tells the converter how many pixels to draw per inch of that page. For an A4 page:
- 72 dpi: 595 × 842 pixels
- 150 dpi: 1240 × 1754 pixels
- 300 dpi: 2480 × 3508 pixels
- 600 dpi: 4960 × 7016 pixels
A US Letter page at 300 dpi comes out at 2550 × 3300. Double the dpi and you get four times the pixels, and roughly four times the file size.
Which one to choose
- Sharing on WhatsApp, Slack or social media: 150 dpi. Phones show it crisply, and the app will shrink anything bigger anyway.
- Slides and documents: 150 dpi, or 200 if the page has small print.
- Printing: 300 dpi. That's what print shops expect.
- Reading tiny text, plans or old scans: 600 dpi, but only for the pages you need. The files get large fast.
- Upload forms with a size cap: start at 150 and only go higher if the text looks soft.
JPG or PNG?
JPG is the safe default for pages with photos and for anything that has to open everywhere. For pages that are mostly text, diagrams or tables, PNG is often the better choice: it keeps letter edges perfectly clean, and on a white page with black text it can even be smaller than JPG. Choose WebP if the images are going on a website.
Turning it back into a PDF
If you converted pages to edit them as images, JPG to PDF puts them back together. And if you only needed a few pages as a separate PDF, Split PDF keeps the text selectable, which images never do.