What is a PDF image extractor?

A PDF stores the pictures on its pages as separate image files inside the document: photos, logos, charts, illustrations, and in a scanned document, the scan of every page. A PDF image extractor pulls these images out, so you can save and reuse them at the resolution they have in the PDF, instead of taking screenshots of the pages.

Tool description

This tool finds every image in a PDF and shows them in a grid, with the size of each image in pixels and its file size. You can download each image on its own, or all of them at once as a ZIP file. Photos stored as JPEG are saved exactly as they are in the PDF, and all other images are saved as PNG.

Features

  • Extracts photos, logos, charts, and scanned pages from any PDF
  • Saves JPEG photos without re-encoding, so they keep their full quality and file size
  • Saves all other images as lossless PNG, with transparency kept
  • Lists an image that appears on many pages, such as a logo, only once
  • Names each file after its page, such as page-3-image-2.jpg
  • Downloads single images or all of them as a ZIP file
  • Runs in your browser, so the PDF never leaves your device

How it works

The tool reads the PDF with PDF.js and goes through the pages one by one, collecting the images each page draws, including images in form fields and stamps. PDF.js decodes every image format a PDF can hold, applies its transparency mask, and converts its colors to RGB.

When an image is stored as a plain JPEG file in gray or RGB colors, the tool copies the original JPEG data out of the PDF instead of decoding it, so the photo stays byte for byte the same. Other images, such as CMYK photos, images with transparency, and compressed bitmaps, are saved as PNG after decoding. Images that appear in the PDF more than once are compared by their content and listed on the first page where they appear.

Black-and-white stencil images, which PDFs often use for scanned text pages, are saved as black on white.

Notes

  • Password-protected PDFs can't be read. Remove the password first.
  • A PDF with restrictions, such as no copying or printing, is encrypted even when it opens without a password. Its images are extracted as usual, but JPEG photos are saved as PNG, because their stored data is encrypted and can't be copied as it is.
  • Vector graphics, such as charts drawn with lines and shapes, and text are not images, so they are not extracted. To save a whole page as a picture, convert the page to PNG instead.
  • Images keep the resolution they are stored at in the PDF, which can be larger or smaller than they look on the page. A cropped or scaled image is extracted whole.
  • Very large images may be scaled down to the largest size your browser can draw.