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PDF to JPEG in Preview App Big Sur 75 inches bug

The new OS Big Sur has destroyed the option of exporting PDF files to JPED in good quality. The maximum quality is 75 inches. Apple, please fix this. A very useful function that became unusable!

Posted on Feb 15, 2021 5:34 AM

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Posted on Feb 15, 2021 7:36 AM

Only the macOS Product team can fix internal Preview build issues, and there is no user fix for it ignoring DPI in image exports from PDF. That product team does not participate here, so if you want them to know there is an export issue, send them detailed feedback.


At this time, continue to use the Automator solution you have been using, or my Terminal solution if you want.

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Feb 15, 2021 7:36 AM in response to Pentacosi

Only the macOS Product team can fix internal Preview build issues, and there is no user fix for it ignoring DPI in image exports from PDF. That product team does not participate here, so if you want them to know there is an export issue, send them detailed feedback.


At this time, continue to use the Automator solution you have been using, or my Terminal solution if you want.

Feb 15, 2021 7:29 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

It does seem to be a bug in Preview.

As a workaround, I found that the corresponding action in Automator does NOT suffer from this bug, so I was able to create a quick Automator application to convert pdf to jpeg with a given resolution.


Save it anywhere you like, and drag and drop files to convert. I checked the box "Show this action when the workflow runs", so you can even change the resolution and file type every time you run it.



This saves the created file on the Desktop, but you can choose a different location, of course. It also rewrites without warning; you may want to turn that off, for safety.

Feb 15, 2021 6:34 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thank you for your quick reply! I wish it was dpi, but somehow Big Sur uses inches or pixels as a resolution unit. Well, at least in my German version. Yes, I did try to export a vector PDF to jpeg and the result was exactly the same. The quality gets destroyed since it can only export a maximum of 72 inches/pixels. Not 75, I'm sorry. So, the resolution of the exported jpeg is always 1.178x1.682.

Feb 15, 2021 7:28 AM in response to Pentacosi

There is always the Terminal to do the PDF to JPG conversion right, where y is the value returned for pixelHeight in the sips -g all command. The formatOptions value is the JPG quality.


man sips
sips -g all foo.pdf
sips -Z y -s dpiHeight 300.0 -s dpiWidth 300.0 -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 100 -o foo.jpg foo.pdf


The resulting foo.jpg will have the same dimensions as the PDF and will be confirmed by the Preview Inspector to be 300 DPI.


Automator also has a PDF to image action where you can set the DPI and the output image type. Makes a nice drag and drop PDF to image solution.

PDF to JPEG in Preview App Big Sur 75 inches bug

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