How to Extract Images from a PDF

You can extract and save all images from a PDF as PNG files on a page-by-page basis with this little script. If an image has a CMYK colorspace, it will be converted to RGB first.

doc = fitz.open("file.pdf")
for i in range(len(doc)):
    for img in doc.getPageImageList(i):
        xref = img[0]
        pix = fitz.Pixmap(doc, xref)
        if pix.n < 5:       # this is GRAY or RGB
            pix.writePNG("p%s-%s.png" % (i, xref))
        else:               # CMYK: convert to RGB first
            pix1 = fitz.Pixmap(fitz.csRGB, pix)
            pix1.writePNG("p%s-%s.png" % (i, xref))
            pix1 = None
        pix = None

This runs very fast: it takes less than 2 seconds to extract the 180 images of Adobe's manual on a fast desktop PC. As a reminder: this is a PDF with 1310 pages, 30+ MB size and 330,000+ PDF objects.

The script is also contained in the demo directory.

Notes

1. The script relies on the PDF's structural health. It will e.g. not work, if the document's page tree is damaged.
2. If images occur on several pages, they will of course be extracted multiple times. Use Python's hashlib to check if a pixmap has already been written (e.g. via the MD5 code of pix.samples).

There is another image extractor in the demo directory, which scans all PDF objects (ignoring pages) and recovers from several problems. Try that one if your PDF has defects.