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I currently use Foxit's PDF reader, and I recently downloaded an image from the Internet, but it is inside a PDF file. How do I extract this image?

Operating system is Windows 7.

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your highest quality extraction will be to extract to whatever format the image is already stored in within the pdf. (at least i think that's how images-in-pdfs work.) – quack quixote Apr 26 '10 at 17:06
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Use pdfimages.exe (from XPDF). – pipitas Jul 29 '10 at 15:16
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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

The quick way if you don't require original pixel resolution of the image is to just press ALT and Print Screen buttons. Then choose paste where ever you want the image.

The other way to preserve the resolution is to open the PDF in an image editing program such as Adobe Photoshop and work with it there.

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Opening a PDF document in Photoshop causes the 'Rasterize Generic PDF Format' dialog to appear, so the resolution cannot be preserved. Tested with PS7. Are newer versions of Photoshop different? – AffineMesh Apr 27 '10 at 6:55
as you said, [alt]+[prnscr] does not preserve the original pixel resolution (it uses whatever resolution your current screen/monitor uses). – pipitas Jul 29 '10 at 15:18
@studiohack, @UserSuUserDo: Not only will you miss the original resolution if you use [alt]+[prnscr], but you'll get the complete PDF viewer window as a picture. This may be 'good enough' for many use cases. But sometimes you want the graphic as is embedded in the PDF page only. Here pdfimages.exe comes in handy. – pipitas Jul 29 '10 at 15:21
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Or use the snipping tool built into W7 to capture the area you want. – Moab Jul 29 '10 at 15:22
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up vote 18 down vote

If you download XPDF for Windows (here), you'll find a few .exe files inside. You can run them without "installation". Use pdfimages.exe like this:

pdfimages.exe -help

This displays the help screen.

pdfimages.exe ^
    -j ^
    c:\path\to\your.pdf ^
    c:\path\to\where\you\want\images\prefix

This extracts all JPEGs as prefix-00N.jpg, and all the other images as prefix-00N.ppm (Portable PixMap).

pdfimages.exe ^
    -j ^
    -f 11 ^
    -l 13 ^
    c:\path\to\your.pdf ^
    c:\path\to\where\you\want\images\prefix

Same as before, but limits image extraction to pages 11 ('f' = first) to 13 ('l' = last).

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The point of "This extracts all JPEGs ... and all the other images as Portable PixMap .PPM" is important. Sometimes you want a tool that can convert everything to one format – Ron Harlev Jun 23 '11 at 18:25
@harlev: if you want everything as PPM, just leave away the -j from the commandline. – pipitas Jun 23 '11 at 21:06
I want all as JPG. Can this tool do that? – Ron Harlev Jun 23 '11 at 21:46
@harlev: If you want all as JPEG, you can convert the PPMs to JPEG anyway. Remember, not all embedded images have initially been JPEGs in the first place, and hence were not embedded as such... – pipitas Jun 23 '11 at 21:57
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@harlev: Google for ImageMagick. It has a commandline tool that can convert anything to anything called convert. Available for Linux, Windows, MacOS X and what have you. Easiest use case for you: convert some.ppm some.jpeg. – pipitas Jun 24 '11 at 0:15
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up vote 2 down vote

You can try importing the PDF into Inkscape, and work from there. Inkscape will only open one page at time, but will give you complete control over the page contents. You will be able to extract and manipulate vectorial graphics from the PDF quite easily.

However, if you want to extract raster images from the PDF, I'm pretty sure pdfimages from XPDF is easier (but you can still try using Inkscape after learning how to extract embedded images from SVG files).

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