How can I extract images in their native/maximum resolution from a PDF file?

Question

How would one go about extracting images in their native/maximum resolution from a PDF file?

I have been trying different methods of exporting images/screenshots and end up with huge bloated files that are still lower detail than the PDF file.

Answer 1

You can extract images from a pdf file with pdfimages program that is a part of the Poppler library available as poppler-utils package on many Linux based OS. It is even available on Windows. See the man page for pdfimages for available options.

This command lists the images embedded in a PDF file:

pdfimages -list sample.pdf

page   num  type   width height color comp bpc  enc interp  object ID x-ppi y-ppi size ratio
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1     0 image    4960  7008  gray    1   1  jbig2  no         6  0   600   600  132K 3.1%
   2     1 image    4960  7008  gray    1   1  jbig2  no        11  0   600   600 40.4K 1.0%
   3     2 image    4960  7008  gray    1   1  jbig2  no        15  0   600   600 26.3K 0.6%

To extract the images:

pdfimages -j -png sample.pdf sample

This will extract any JPEG images in original JPEG format and the others will default to lossless PNG format, so you'll end up with files like this:

sample-000.jpg
sample-001.jpg
sample-002.png
sample-003.png

In a rare case that you can’t install any software, you might want to try an online service like pdf extract tool.