Just two lines of code for linux users

Let’s say you have a folder consists of hundreds of pdf files. Your job is to convert it into image format (jpg or png). If you are in a Linux environment, then the solution is pretty simple. Just two lines of code!

In the file manager open the folder containing pdf files. Right-click and select Open terminal (here). Once inside that directory,then you can type or copy and paste the following command in the terminal and press enter:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftoppm -jpeg {} {} \;

Here we used a cool tool called [pdftoppm]¹. In the above line of code, we use ‘find’ to search for pdf files and set it to ‘-maxdepth’ and convert it to jpeg format. Done, you will find the converted jpg files in the same directory alongside the old pdf files. But it’s a mess to identify, isn’t it? Make use of ‘mkdir’ and ‘mv’ functions to move these images to a new folder:

mkdir jpg_files && mv *.jpg jpg_files/

There are other methods too, but…

There are other ways to do this especially with [ImageMagick]² but this method is efficient and lossless method for practical use.