Convert PDF to JPEG

Bogdan Ungureanu
Linux

I know there are allot of online tools that allows you to convert PDF to JPG. For confidential reasons I prefer to do it locally on my machine, keeping sensitive documents private and ensuring compliance with data protection policies.

Why Convert PDF to JPEG Locally?

Converting PDFs to images locally offers several advantages:

  • Privacy & Security: Your documents stay on your machine, not uploaded to third-party servers
  • Batch Processing: Convert multiple files automatically without repetitive manual steps
  • No Size Limits: Process large PDF files without worrying about upload restrictions
  • Cost Effective: Free, open-source tools eliminate subscription costs
  • Automation: Integrate PDF conversion into scripts and workflows

Using pdftoppm - The Primary Tool

The pdftoppm command line tool is a powerful utility from the Poppler suite for converting PDFs to image formats.

Basic Usage

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -r 300 document.pdf document

The flags mean:

  • -jpeg - Sets the output image format to JPG
  • -r 300 - Sets the output image resolution to 300 DPI (dots per inch)
  • document - Prefix for all output files, which will be numbered sequentially

All pages will be converted to separate JPEG files numbered as document-1.jpg, document-2.jpg, etc., in your current directory.

Useful pdftoppm Options

Convert to PNG format with higher quality:

$ pdftoppm -png -r 300 document.pdf document

Convert only specific pages (e.g., pages 1-5):

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -f 1 -l 5 -r 300 document.pdf document

Reduce resolution for smaller file sizes:

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 document.pdf document

Use different scaling:

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -scale-to 1024 document.pdf document

Convert single page to specific output file:

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -singlefile document.pdf output

Alternative Utilities

ImageMagick (convert command):

$ convert -density 300 document.pdf document.jpg

ImageMagick is versatile and supports many formats, but can be slower for large batches.

Ghostscript:

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300 -sOutputFile=document-%d.jpg document.pdf

Ghostscript is powerful for advanced PDF processing and supports more complex conversions.

Batch Processing Multiple PDFs

Create a script to convert all PDFs in a directory:

#!/bin/bash
for pdf in *.pdf; do
  pdftoppm -jpeg -r 300 "$pdf" "${pdf%.pdf}"
done

Save this as convert_all.sh, make it executable with chmod +x convert_all.sh, and run it in a directory with PDF files.

Installation

On Ubuntu/Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

On Fedora/RHEL:

$ sudo dnf install poppler-utils

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