JPG to PDF and PDF to JPG Converter

How the JPG To PDF works

JPG to PDF: what to know first

JPG to PDF is the conversion behind scanned receipts, photographed documents, signed forms and portfolios: a stack of photos that has to arrive as one file, in one order, in a format that opens the same everywhere. This page builds that file locally, so the photos never leave your machine.

Pages and sizes. Each image becomes one page. With A4, Letter, A5 or Legal, the image is scaled to fit inside the page, minus the margin, and centred; a portrait photo on a landscape page leaves white space at the sides, which is why Auto orientation turns each page to match its image. Fit to image makes the page exactly the size of the picture, at 96 pixels per inch, with no white space at all, which is what you want when the PDF is only a container and will never be printed.

Order. Pages follow the order in which the files were chosen. Most file pickers select in the order you click, and a drag-and-drop of several files uses the order the operating system lists them, usually alphabetical. Name the files 01.jpg, 02.jpg and so on if the order matters.

No quality loss. PDF can hold JPEG data natively, so the bytes of each image are copied into the file unchanged. Nothing is decoded and re-compressed; the PDF is roughly the sum of the JPG sizes plus a few kilobytes of structure. If the PDF is too large, compress the images first, then come back.

What PDF cannot hold directly. CMYK JPEGs and some progressive JPEGs are not accepted by the embedding library. Open the file in an image editor, save it as a standard baseline RGB JPEG, and try again. PNG files go to the PNG to PDF page, which handles transparency properly.

Metadata. EXIF inside each JPEG travels with the image bytes into the PDF, including any GPS location. Strip it first with the EXIF remover if the PDF is going to strangers.

Going the other way: PDF to JPG

PDF to JPG is what you need when a page has to go where PDFs cannot: a social post, a slide, a web page, a chat message, an image-only upload form. This page rasterises the PDF with the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs, so what you get is what a browser would show, fonts, vector graphics and embedded images included.

Resolution. A PDF page has a physical size in points, 72 to the inch, and no pixels until it is drawn. The DPI setting decides how many. At 72 DPI an A4 page is 595 × 842 pixels, fine for a thumbnail; at 150 DPI it is 1240 × 1754, good for screens; at 300 DPI it is 2480 × 3508, which matches a print scan and is the choice if the JPG is going to be printed or zoomed into. Higher DPI means a larger file and more memory, and the page is capped at around 64 megapixels, so for 300 DPI on a very large page or on the all-pages option you may need to step down.

JPEG and documents. JPEG was made for photographs, and text pages are the worst case for it: faint smudging clusters around every letter edge. Quality 90, the default, keeps that invisible at normal size. For pages that are mostly text, or for a lossless result, use the PDF to PNG page. For pages that are mostly photographs, JPG is the right choice and much smaller.

One page at a time, or all in one. A download gives one file, and this page does not make zip archives. For a handful of pages, change the page number and download again; the PDF stays loaded. For the whole document at once, enter 0 and every page is rendered into a single tall image, top to bottom, which is a convenient way to share a short document as one picture and to paste into a chat or a note.

What the render includes. Everything a viewer would draw: text in the embedded fonts, vector lines and fills, images, and annotations that have an appearance. Form field values are drawn where the PDF stores an appearance for them. Nothing is uploaded and the document is discarded from memory when you drop another or leave the page.

Password-protected files. A PDF that needs a password to open cannot be rendered here. Remove the password in the application that owns it, then return.

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