Generate PDF Thumbnails on iOS

A thumbnail is a low-resolution image representation of a PDF page. Thumbnails are generally used to recognize, navigate, or organize PDF pages. Generating a thumbnail preview of a PDF page is a common use case for any app that displays PDFs.

To render a thumbnail image from a PDF file in PSPDFKit for iOS, you need to do the following:

// Create a URL for the PDF file.
guard let path = Bundle.main.path(forResource: "report", ofType: "pdf") else { return }
let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: path)

// Instantiate a `Document` from the PDF file's URL.
let document = Document(url: url)

let pageIndex: PageIndex = 0
guard let pageImageSize = document.pageInfoForPage(at: pageIndex)?.mediaBox.size else { return }

// Set the thumbnail size to be five times smaller than the actual page size.
let thumbnailImageSize = CGSize(width: pageImageSize.width / 5, height: pageImageSize.height / 5)

// Create a render request from your `Document`.
let request = MutableRenderRequest(document: document)
request.imageSize = thumbnailImageSize
request.pageIndex = pageIndex

do {
    // Create a render task using the `MutableRenderRequest`.
    let task = try RenderTask(request: request)
    task.priority = .utility
    PSPDFKit.SDK.shared.renderManager.renderQueue.schedule(task)

    // The page is rendered as a `UIImage`.
    let image = try PSPDFKit.SDK.shared.cache.image(for: request, imageSizeMatching: [.allowLarger])
} catch {
    // Handle error.
}

The RenderTask API used in the above example is an asynchronous API that won’t block the main thread when rendering a PDF page to an image. It includes an image cache by default, so multiple render calls for the same page are fetched directly from the cache. For a more detailed explanation of image rendering, check out our guide on rendering PDF pages and our blog post on converting a PDF to an image.

Additionally, PSPDFKit provides another API to render a PDF page to an image: imageForPage:at:size:clippedTo:annotations:options. One thing to keep in mind is that this is a synchronous call that will block the main thread when it’s rendering a particularly large or complex PDF page.