How to Get the Original Images Out of a PDF
Need the photos from a brochure, catalogue or report? Learn the difference between extracting embedded images and taking screenshots of pages, and how to get the best quality.
You have a PDF with pictures you want to reuse: product photos from a supplier's catalogue, illustrations from a report, photos from an event brochure. Taking a screenshot is the obvious idea, but it captures only what fits on your screen, at screen resolution, often with text and margins around it. A better way is to pull out the images that are stored inside the PDF, in the quality they were saved in. This guide explains how.
How images are stored in a PDF
A PDF page is a set of drawing instructions: write this text here, draw this line there, place this image at this position and size. Photos and other pictures are stored as separate image objects inside the file, often at a higher resolution than they appear on the page. When you view the page, the reader scales the image to fit its frame.
That means there are two ways to get a picture out:
- Render the page as an image, capturing everything visible: text, graphics and pictures. That is a high-quality screenshot.
- Extract the embedded image objects themselves, without the surrounding page.
Extracting images with PDF to Image
- Open PDF to Image and choose your PDF.
- In the options panel, select Extract Images instead of "Page to JPG".
- Press Extract Images. The tool scans every page for embedded pictures.
- If one image is found, it downloads directly; several images arrive together in a ZIP file.
Why some images might be "missing"
Sometimes extraction finds fewer images than you expected, or none. Usually that's because of how the PDF was made:
- Vector graphics: logos, icons, charts and diagrams are often drawn with lines and shapes rather than stored as pictures. They are part of the page, not images, so they can't be extracted as such. Use "Page to JPG" with High quality to capture them.
- Text that looks like an image: large stylised headings are usually fonts, not pictures.
- Images split into pieces: some programs cut a picture into strips or tiles when creating the PDF. You'll get several partial images that together make up the whole picture.
- Transparency: JPG has no transparent areas. A cut-out product photo or a logo with a transparent background is therefore saved with a solid background, often black, around the subject.
- Repeated images: a picture that appears on many pages, such as a logo in the header, is stored once in the PDF and is extracted only once.
Scanned documents
In a scanned PDF, every page is a single image of the paper. Extracting images therefore gives you one picture per page, typically at the resolution the scanner used. That's a quick way to get the raw scans back, for example to process them again with Scan to PDF for cleaner, smaller pages.
Extract Images or Page to JPG?
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| The photos from a brochure or catalogue | Extract Images |
| A chart or diagram | Page to JPG, High quality |
| A whole page including text | Page to JPG |
| The raw pages of a scan | Extract Images |
| Part of a page | Page to JPG, then crop the image in any photo editor |
Respect copyright
Being able to extract an image doesn't mean you're allowed to reuse it. Photos in catalogues, magazines and reports are usually protected by copyright. Extracting them for your own reference is one thing; publishing them on a website or in your own material normally needs permission from the owner. When in doubt, ask the publisher of the document.
Privacy
The PDF is opened and analysed inside your browser with PDF.js. Neither the document nor the extracted images are uploaded anywhere, so you can safely use the tool on internal or confidential material.