Convert a PDF to a PNG on your Mac
Drag the PDF into Images by Edmund, choose which page you want, set a size and press Export. A PDF page is a vector like an SVG, so the app draws it at the size you asked for rather than scaling up a thumbnail. That is why the text in the result stays crisp instead of going fuzzy.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.
Free, with nothing to unlock and no account.
Convert a page right here
Drop a PDF in, choose the page and how large you want it, and get a PNG back. It happens in this tab, on your own machine: the file is never uploaded.
PDF to PNG, step by step
- Drag the PDF inA multi page document is fine. The card tells you how many pages it holds and lets you pick the one you want rather than assuming the first.
- Choose PNG and a sizeAs with any vector there is no natural pixel size, so the size you choose is the one that matters. Larger costs nothing in sharpness, only in bytes.
- Press ExportThe PNG lands beside the PDF or in a folder you pick. If you need several pages, export them one at a time by changing the page on the card.
macOS does not read PDF as an image at all, so the app reads it directly
The image machinery built into macOS lists more than sixty formats it can open, and PDF is not among them. The app therefore opens PDFs itself, through the PDF framework, which is also what lets it show you a thumbnail and a page count for a file the rest of the system will not treat as a picture. Doing that raises a question most converters get wrong: which rectangle is the page. A PDF carries several, and the one you see in a viewer is the crop box rather than the larger media box that carries bleed and printer's marks. Using the wrong one gives you a page with a white border and crop marks around it. The app takes the crop box, and turns it by whatever rotation the page declares, so what you get is the page as you saw it.
Why not just use a converter website?
A PDF page is type and vector artwork, and both look obviously wrong once they have been resampled. Most converters rasterise the page once at some fixed resolution and scale that bitmap up to the size you asked for. Drawing the page at the size you actually want is the difference between a usable image and one that looks photographed, and on a page of body copy the difference is unmissable.
And a PDF is rarely just a picture. They are the documents most likely to be somebody else’s confidential business: contracts, invoices, drafts, medical letters. Uploading one to a free converter to get a picture out of page two is a disclosure, whether or not anything comes of it.
Questions
Can I convert every page at once?
Not in one press, no. Each card is one output, and you choose which page it renders. For a long document that is deliberate rather than a limitation: exporting three hundred PNGs by accident is a worse outcome than exporting the two you wanted.
Why is the text in my PNG blurry in other converters?
Because they rasterise the page once at a fixed resolution and then scale that bitmap to the size you asked for. A PDF page is a vector, so it can be drawn at any size exactly, which is what happens here.
What resolution should I choose?
For a page going on screen, twice the size it will be displayed at is a sensible default. For print, work back from the physical size and the dots per inch you need. There is no upper limit imposed by the file itself.
Does it handle a rotated page?
Yes. A page can carry a rotation independently of how its contents are stored, and the app applies it, so a landscape page that was scanned sideways comes out the way round you see it in Preview.
Other things it does
There is a full list on the Images by Edmund product page, along with what else the app does.
Get Images by Edmund.
Free, and it does the other eight jobs too. Two ways to get it when it lands: the Mac App Store, or straight from here.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.