Converting PDF Pages to High-Resolution Images

Use Cases for PDF-to-Image Conversion

• Thumbnails — show a preview image in document management UIs
• Archiving — rasterise documents for long-term image-based archives
• Social sharing — generate a preview card from the first page
• OCR pipeline — convert to image before passing to an OCR engine
• Slide decks — export a PDF presentation as a sequence of images

API Usage

curl -X POST https://api.toolkitapi.io/v1/pdf/to-image \
  -H "X-API-Key: $API_KEY" \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "format=png" \
  -F "dpi=150" \
  -F "pages=1"

For a single page, the response is the image binary. For multiple pages, the response is a ZIP archive containing one image per page.

DPI Guidelines

Higher DPI = larger files. For web previews, 150 DPI at JPEG quality 85 is a good balance.

Format Choice

• PNG — lossless, best for text-heavy documents
• JPEG — smaller files, best for image-heavy pages
• WebP — smallest files, good for web delivery

Thumbnail Generation Pipeline

import httpx, zipfile, io

def generate_thumbnails(pdf_bytes: bytes, page_count: int) -> list[bytes]:
    resp = httpx.post(
        "https://api.toolkitapi.io/v1/pdf/to-image",
        headers={"X-API-Key": API_KEY},
        files={"file": pdf_bytes},
        data={"format": "webp", "dpi": 96, "pages": f"1-{page_count}"},
        timeout=30,
    )
    with zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(resp.content)) as zf:
        return [zf.read(name) for name in sorted(zf.namelist())]