Notion PDF import missing images? Why slides break and how to fix it
You import a lecture deck or a scanned textbook chapter into Notion, open the new page, and most of it is gone: the diagrams, the charts, the slide layouts, sometimes entire pages. Nothing went wrong on your end. This is how Notion's built-in PDF import works, and it matters a lot for anyone who studies from visual material.
What Notion's import actually does
Notion's PDF import is a text extractor. It reads the machine-readable text inside the PDF and rebuilds it as Notion blocks: paragraphs, headings, and simple tables. Images embedded in the PDF are not extracted, complex layouts are flattened, and formatting like equations, columns, and callouts is approximated or dropped. The feature is also in beta, with file size limits of 5MB on the free plan and 20MB on paid plans.
For a text-heavy document — a contract, an article, a plain report — this is often fine. The words are what you need, and searchable text inside Notion is genuinely useful.
Why slides and scans lose the most
Lecture slides are mostly visual. The meaning lives in the diagram, the annotated figure, the layout of a worked example — exactly the parts a text extractor cannot carry over. A 40-slide deck can import as a few paragraphs of orphaned bullet points with every figure missing.
Scanned PDFs fail even harder. A scan is an image of a page, with no text layer to extract, so the import produces little or nothing. Textbooks, handwritten problem sets, and older papers are usually in this category.
The fix: import pages as images, not extracted text
When the visual layout is the content, the reliable approach is the opposite of text extraction: render each PDF page as an image and place those images into Notion in order. Every diagram, equation, and slide stays exactly as designed, and scans work just as well as digital PDFs because nothing depends on a text layer.
This is the approach NoteBelow automates. You connect Notion, upload a PDF up to 100MB, and it creates a workbook under the page you choose: each PDF page becomes an image with note space underneath, and long documents are split into chapter pages. The result is material you can actually study from — the page as designed, with your notes anchored right below it.