Convert AI to JPG
JPG is what you reach for when the file has to be small and ordinary — a listing, an email, a form that accepts nothing else. For Illustrator artwork it involves two lossy steps rather than one, and both are described here rather than left to be discovered.
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Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Rendered at 150 dpi, not the default 72
- Transparency composited onto white, deliberately
- Encoded at quality 82, a number we publish
- No Illustrator and no Adobe account
How to use AI to JPG
- 1
Add the AI file
Drop it in. Modern Illustrator files are PDF underneath, which is why this works without Illustrator.
- 2
Rendered, then encoded
The drawing is rasterized at 150 dpi and encoded as JPEG at quality 82. Transparent areas are filled with white first.
- 3
Download the JPG
Small, universally accepted, and photographic in the way JPEG expects.
How it works
Ghostscript renders the artwork at 150 dpi — the resolution is set before the file is read, because it is a read-time setting and does nothing afterwards. Transparent pixels are composited onto white and the alpha channel is removed, then the result is encoded as JPEG at quality 82.
Two lossy steps, not one
Converting vector artwork to JPG loses information twice, and it is worth knowing which loss is which because only one of them is recoverable.
Rasterization turns infinitely scalable geometry into a fixed grid of pixels. At 150 dpi that grid is fine enough for a screen and finite: enlarge the result and there is no more detail to find. This loss is permanent in the JPG but not in your workflow — the AI file still has the geometry.
JPEG encoding then discards detail within that grid. At quality 82 the loss is invisible on photographs and mildly visible on hard edges, as a faint softening or halo along a boundary between two flat colors. Every re-save compounds it.
PNG avoids the second loss entirely and is the better target for anything with flat color and sharp edges, which describes most Illustrator work. JPG earns its place when the destination demands it or the file must be small.
The one number that matters
If a vector conversion has ever come back unusably small, the cause was almost certainly the resolution, not the file.
A point is 1/72 inch. At the default 72 dpi one point becomes exactly one pixel, so a 200-point drawing becomes 200 pixels — a thumbnail of something that could have been printed on a wall. 150 dpi is used here for that reason, and the result is measurably 417 pixels from that same 200-point source.
Keep the AI file
The JPG is a rendering at one size, in a format that loses a little more each time it is saved. The Illustrator file is the artwork, and it can produce a new rendering at any size at any time.
Send the JPG. Keep the AI.
What size the file will be
A rough expectation, so the result is not a surprise.
Illustrator artwork is mostly flat color, which JPEG compresses very efficiently — there is little of the fine variation the codec spends bits on. A logo that renders 417 by 313 typically lands between 10 and 40 kilobytes. A detailed illustration with gradients and many colors will be several times that, and a full-page piece can reach a few hundred kilobytes.
If a form imposes a size limit and you are over it, the answer is almost never to convert again. It is to reduce the dimensions: half the width and half the height is a quarter of the pixels, and for a logo that will be displayed at 200 pixels wide anyway, nothing is lost that was ever going to be seen.
Examples
A logo for a marketplace listing
Marketplaces frequently reject anything but JPEG. The transparent background becomes white, which is what those listings show anyway.
An illustration for an email
Small enough to attach without thinking about it. For anything with hard edges and flat color, /ai-to-png will look cleaner.
Frequently asked questions
Why is JPG a poor fit for Illustrator artwork?
Because the two are built for opposite things. JPEG assumes photographs — continuous tone, gradual changes, no hard boundaries — and compresses by discarding detail the eye is unlikely to notice in that kind of image. Illustrator artwork is the other case entirely: flat color, crisp edges, often text. JPEG puts faint haloes around those edges. At quality 82 it is usually acceptable and occasionally visible on thin lines. /ai-to-png has neither problem.
What happens to the transparent background?
It becomes white. JPEG has no alpha channel, so a converter must put something behind a see-through pixel; white is chosen here and said out loud. Tools that hand back a logo on a black rectangle are not choosing black — they are not choosing at all, and black is what the raw pixel data underneath happens to be.
How large will the image be?
The drawing's point size at 150 dpi — a little over twice its nominal dimensions. A 200 by 150 point logo becomes 417 by 313 pixels, measured. That is a deliberate choice: the near-universal default of 72 dpi makes one point one pixel and produces images too small to use.
I need it much bigger. What should I do?
Convert to PDF with /ai-to-pdf, which keeps the artwork as real vectors, and render from there at whatever size you need. Enlarging a JPG adds no detail and makes the compression artifacts larger along with everything else, so a doubled image looks worse than the original rather than bigger. The geometry in the AI file can be drawn at any size; the pixels in the JPG cannot.
Is my file uploaded?
Yes. Ghostscript does the rendering and it runs on our server, because interpreting PostScript safely is not a browser job. Your file and the result are deleted within 30 minutes by a timer rather than by an intention, and nothing is stored, indexed or associated with an account.