How to Convert PNG and JPG Images to PDF Privately
A careful PNG-to-PDF or JPG-to-PDF workflow keeps page images on your device, preserves their intended order, and ends with a check of the finished document.
Read guide →Unlock PDF
Decrypt a PDF you can open so other tools stop refusing it, losslessly and without sending the document to a server.
Drop a PDF here or click to browse
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Reviewed 2026-08-15
Free Unlock PDF – how it works
An encrypted PDF breaks a lot of ordinary workflows. Merge tools reject it, compressors cannot read the streams, and text extraction returns nothing. Unlocking removes the encryption layer so the document behaves like any other PDF.
qpdf performs the decryption inside the page. The output keeps the original page objects, embedded fonts, and text layer, so a document that had selectable text still has selectable text. That is the difference between decrypting and the common workaround of re-printing the file, which turns the pages into images.
This handles encryption, which is the restriction that actually blocks software. It is not a way into a document whose password you do not have.
How to use Unlock PDF online
- Add the locked PDF. Drop in the file that other tools are refusing to open or process.
- Supply the password if there is one. Enter the password that opens the document. Some PDFs carry permission restrictions with no open password at all, in which case the field can stay empty.
- Download and continue. Save the unlocked file and feed it into whatever tool was rejecting it.
When to use it
- Unlock a statement so a merge or split tool will accept it.
- Make an encrypted document readable by a text extraction step.
- Clear restrictions blocking a compression pass before archiving.
- Prepare a protected file for an automated pipeline that cannot answer a password prompt.
Known limitations
- If the document requires a password to open, you have to know it. Encryption without the key is not breakable here.
- Unlocking removes protection from the copy you download. Keep the encrypted original if the protection still matters.
- Permission flags that a reader chose to enforce are gone after unlocking, but flags were never a real security boundary in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
Can this unlock a PDF when I do not know the password?
No. Documents needing a password to open use AES encryption, and the content cannot be recovered without the credential. Files that only carry permission restrictions and open freely can be processed with the password field left blank.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The document is processed by WebAssembly and JavaScript running inside the page, so the bytes never leave your device. There is no upload step and nothing to delete afterwards.
Is the unlocked PDF identical to the original?
The page content is. Decryption rewrites the file without the encryption layer while leaving text, fonts, images, and bookmarks untouched, so nothing is rasterised or re-compressed.
Which tool should I use, Unlock PDF or Remove PDF Password?
Both run the same qpdf decryption. Pick Unlock PDF when the goal is to get another tool to accept the file, and Remove PDF Password when the goal is to stop being prompted every time you open it.
Does unlocking work on scanned PDFs?
Yes, though a scanned document contains page images rather than text, so it will still have no searchable text after unlocking. That is a property of the scan, not the encryption.
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