No Products in the Cart
Maybe it's a scanned family memoir. A yearbook someone put together years ago as a PDF. A wedding program, a school project, or a digital keepsake that only exists as one long PDF file. Whatever it is, if you have a finished project sitting in PDF form, there's a simple way to get it ready for our editor — no design software needed.
Our photo book editor is built around images — you drop in photos, and it lays them out page by page. A PDF, on the other hand, is one continuous file. To use a PDF project in the editor, each page needs to become its own individual JPG image, and those images need to be named so that dropping the whole folder in preserves the correct order.
Doing this by hand, page by page, screenshot by screenshot, is tedious and the quality often suffers. The good news: AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can now do this conversion for you in a couple of minutes, for free, with no software to install.
1. Upload your PDF.
Open a new conversation with Claude or ChatGPT and upload your PDF file directly into the chat.
2. Ask it to convert each page into a numbered JPG.
Copy and paste something like this (replace MyBook with your actual project name):
"Convert every page of this PDF into a separate JPG image, at least 300 DPI since these will be printed. Name each file sequentially with the book title and page number — for example, MyBook_page-001.jpg, MyBook_page-002.jpg, and so on, so they sort in the correct order. Package all the JPGs into a single zip file I can download."
This works the same way in both Claude and ChatGPT. If your tool doesn't automatically zip the files, just add: "and give me a zip file with all of them."
3. Download and unzip the folder.
You'll end up with a folder full of individually named JPGs, one per page, in the correct order.
4. Drop the folder into our photo book editor.
Open a new project and upload your images.
5. Sort by "Old to new."
In the Filter menu, choose the "Old to new" sort option. Because your files are named sequentially, this instantly puts every page in the correct order — no manual reordering needed.
6. Design as usual.
From here, it's just like working with any other set of photos in our editor — arrange, adjust, add captions, and build your book.
The steps above are for your interior pages — but a cover works differently, and it needs its own prompt.
Unlike interior pages, a book cover isn't a stack of separate images. It's one continuous spread: back cover, spine, and front cover all in a single file. If you ask an AI tool to convert a cover PDF the same way you did your interior pages, it'll likely split it into pieces or crop it — not what you want.
Instead, use this prompt:
"Convert this PDF into a single high-resolution JPG image, at least 300 DPI. Keep the full spread intact — back cover, spine, and front cover as one continuous image — do not split it into separate pages or crop any part of it."
This keeps the whole wraparound cover as one file, ready to use in your project.
To apply it: place the full cover image on the front cover position, then select Background, and choose Spread. The editor will automatically stretch the image across the spine and back cover to fit — no need to measure or match spine width yourself.
Whatever your PDF started as — a memoir, a project, a digital scrapbook someone put together years ago — turning it into a real, printed photo book gives it a permanence that a digital file never can.
Ready to get started? Begin your project with our photo book editor today.
