Change PowerPoint to JPG, one picture per slide

To convert a PPT to JPG, select or drop your .pptx or .ppt file on this page, choose a Resolution and an Image quality, and press Convert to JPEG. Each slide comes back as a picture of its own. A one-slide deck gives a single JPG named after the file, and a longer deck gives a ZIP of slides in order: pitch.pptx became pitch.zip, holding pitch-p001.jpg, pitch-p002.jpg and so on.

People turn PowerPoint to JPEG when a slide has to travel as a picture: a thumbnail for a video or a course, a slide to post on social media, a chart to paste into a report or a chat, or a deck for someone who has no PowerPoint. JPG and JPEG are two names for one format, so PPTX to JPG and PPT to JPEG give the same kind of file.

• Hidden slides are left out: our test deck of five slides, one of them hidden, came back as four JPGs.
• Speaker notes are not included, so only the slide itself is in each picture.
• Animations and transitions do not play. Text or shapes set to appear on a click are already showing in the picture.
• Photos and shapes come through where you placed them on the slide.

Behind the scenes, the deck is first saved as a PDF with one page per slide, the same step as when you save PowerPoint as PDF, and each page is then drawn as a JPG. That is why the route shows two steps. When the words must stay searchable and selectable, send the PDF rather than pictures.

Resolution, in dots per inch (DPI), sets how many pixels each slide gets: 96, 150 or 300 DPI, with 150 as the default. Image quality sets how hard each picture is compressed: Smaller, Balanced (the default) or Best. We converted a widescreen (16:9) deck at Balanced, with a plain title slide and a slide filled with a photo:

An older 4:3 slide is narrower, 1500 × 1125 pixels at 150 DPI. Image quality matters most on photos: at 150 DPI the photo slide was 217 KB on Smaller, 341 KB on Balanced and 773 KB on Best, while the title slide only went from 57 KB to 84 KB.

• 96 DPI suits slides shown on a screen or sent by email, where a small file helps.
• 150 DPI suits thumbnails, social posts and slides placed in a document.
• 300 DPI is for printing, or for a chart with small labels that someone will zoom into.

Our server does not have Microsoft's fonts, so free ones stand in when your slides are drawn. In our test deck, Calibri was drawn with Carlito, which has the same letter widths, so a title takes the same room as in PowerPoint. Aptos, PowerPoint's newer default, was drawn with Liberation Sans: it looks much the same, but a line break can move. Futura, which our server lacks, came out in a plain sans-serif.

JPEG compresses each picture and has no transparency. That suits photos, but on flat colour and lettering it leaves a faint haze, and it does not even save space there. At 150 DPI our plain title slide was 64 KB as a Balanced JPG and 26 KB as a PNG, and a slide with coloured bars and a paragraph was 90 KB against 59 KB. The photo slide turned it round: 341 KB as a JPG, 2,574 KB as a PNG.

So for slides that are mostly words, charts or diagrams, convert PowerPoint to PNG for sharper edges and often a smaller file. Pick JPG for slides full of photos, or when a site or form asks for JPG. For a deck that should play by itself in a post, turn the slides into an animated GIF instead.

One deck can be up to 100 slides. A 101-slide deck was stopped before any picture was made, with a message saying how many pages it comes to, so you know where to split it; a 100-slide deck came back as a ZIP of 100 JPGs. A whole deck counts as one of your three free conversions a day, however many slides it has.

Older .ppt files from PowerPoint 97 to 2003 convert the same way as .pptx, with no need to resave them first: a .ppt copy of our test deck gave the same four JPGs.

Need a picture back in a deck? Convert JPG to PowerPoint puts it on a slide of its own. Other documents become JPG pictures the same way: convert Word to JPG for a .docx or .doc, one picture per page, or convert HTML to JPG for a saved web page.