Guide
Getting the original pictures out of a PDF
Taking a screenshot of a PDF page gives you the picture at screen resolution, with the page around it. But the PDF usually holds the picture itself, often at a much higher resolution than it’s displayed. This tool finds every image embedded in the document and saves it as a separate file: the full photo from a brochure, the original figure from a paper, the logo from a letterhead.
How images are found
The tool goes through every page and looks at what is actually painted: each picture placed on the page is decoded to its pixels. You see a grid of thumbnails with each image’s size in pixels and the pages it appears on. A logo repeated on every page is listed once.
What is not an image:
- Vector graphics: charts, diagrams and logos drawn with lines and shapes.
- Text, including large decorative headings.
- Masks used to shape or clip other graphics.
For those, save the page as a picture with PDF to PNG and crop it with Crop Image.
Filtering out the noise
Documents often contain small images: icons, bullet symbols, thin decorative lines, tracking pixels in exported emails. By default, images under 32 pixels are hidden. Raise the filter to 100 or 300 pixels to see only real photos and figures, or choose Show all to see everything. Click any image to leave it out of the download.
PNG or JPG
- PNG saves exactly the pixels decoded from the PDF and keeps transparency. Use it for figures, screenshots, diagrams and logos, and whenever you will edit the image.
- JPG is much smaller for photographs. It’s re-compressed at high quality (92%) on a white background, which is fine for reuse in documents, slides and websites.
The tool decodes the images and saves them in the format you choose; it doesn’t copy the original compressed data out of the file. For photos stored as JPEG in the PDF, the PNG version is lossless but larger than the original.
Resolution: what to expect
The images come out at the resolution stored in the PDF. Professionally produced brochures often contain 300 dpi photos, which means large, print-quality files. PDFs made for the web or compressed to be small may contain reduced images, and extraction can’t add detail that was removed. If an image looks blocky, the PDF only had that much.
Respecting rights
Images in documents are usually copyrighted. Extracting them for your own reference, or to reuse your organisation’s own material, is common; republishing someone else’s photos generally needs permission.
Pictures stay on your computer
Decoding happens in your browser, page by page, and the files are saved straight to your downloads. That keeps unpublished reports, client brochures and confidential figures where they belong.
Related tools
To turn whole pages into images, use PDF to JPG or PDF to PNG. To make extracted photos smaller, use the Image Compressor, and to change their format, the Image Converter.
A worked example: figures for a presentation
A student needs three figures from a journal article for a seminar talk.
- Open the article PDF; the grid shows 7 images after hiding small ones, including two photos, three microscope images and two logos.
- Click the logos to leave them out.
- Choose PNG to keep the figures exact, and download the .zip.
- Insert the figures into the slides and credit the source on each slide.
Checked against the current version of the Extract PDF Images on .