Extracting Images from PDF files - Pdfimages

Pdfimages is an open source command-line utility for extracting images from PDF files. It is freely available as part of poppler-utils and xpdf-utils, and included by default with many Linux distributions.

Pdfimages saves images from a Portable Document Format  (PDF)  file  as Portable Pixmap (PPM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), or JPEG files. Pdfimages  reads  the  PDF file, scans one or more pages, PDF-file, and writes one PPM, PBM, or JPEG file for each  image,  image-root-nnn.xxx, where  nnn  is  the image number and xxx is the image type (.ppm, .pbm,.jpg).

NB: pdfimages extracts the raw image data from the  PDF  file,  without performing  any  additional  transforms.  Any rotation, clipping, color inversion, etc. done by the PDF content stream is ignored.

Pdfimages Configuration File:
Pdfimages reads a configuration file at startup.   It  first  tries  to find the user’s private config file, ~/.xpdfrc.  If that doesn’t exist, it looks for a system-wide config file, typically /etc/xpdfrc

Pdfimages Installation:
pdfimages is installed using poppler-utils package under various Linux distributions:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

Using Pdfimages:
Open the terminal and type following command to extract images from any pdf file:

pdfimages file.pdf foo

Where:
 * file.pdf -- Is the pdf file from where we need to extract images
 * foo -- Directory where the extracted images from the pdf file will be saved.

Many of the following options can be set with commands.  These are listed below with the description

-f number: Specifies the first page to scan.
-l number: Specifies the last page to scan.
-j : Normally, all images are written as PBM (for monochrome  images) or  PPM  (for  non-monochrome  images) files.  With this option, images in DCT format are  saved  as  JPEG  files.   All  non-DCT images are saved in PBM/PPM format as usual.
-opw password : Specify  the  owner  password  for the PDF file.  Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.
-upw password : Specify the user password for the PDF file.
-q : Don’t print any messages or errors.  [config file: errQuiet]
-v : Print copyright and version information.
-h : Print usage information.  (-help and --help are equivalent.)