Extract Images

Original files, not screenshots

A PDF does not store a picture the way a photo app does. Each image lives inside the document as a separate object — usually the exact JPEG or JPEG 2000 file the author placed, sometimes raw pixel data compressed with the same algorithm ZIP uses. This tool walks those objects and hands you the original bytes back, so a photo that went in at full quality comes out at full quality.

That is a different job from rendering a page. The PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG tools rasterize each page into a flat screenshot — text, layout, and images fused together. Extract Images skips the page entirely and recovers the asset itself: the logo without the letterhead around it, the chart without the caption, the photo at the resolution it was embedded at.

When an image is stored as raw pixels rather than a JPEG, the tool decodes the color space and re-encodes it as PNG — lossless, so nothing is thrown away. Images compressed with fax encoding (common in scanned documents) come out as TIFF files that any image viewer can open.

What you can do

Built for recovering assets, not just viewing them.

When extraction is not the right tool

Scanned PDFs are the common trap. A scan stores the whole page — text and all — as one large image, so extracting it gives you a picture of a page, not the photos inside it. If what you want is each page as an image, use PDF to JPG or PDF to PNG instead; they are built for exactly that.

A small number of PDFs encode images with JBIG2, a fax-oriented format with no browser decoder. Those images are listed as skipped rather than silently dropped, so the count you see is always honest.