Extract images from a pdf as pdfs

Question

I need to find a tool (python, adobe suite, some cmd line utility, etc) that can extract images from a PDF as individual PDF files - not jpegs, pngs, etc.

Does such a thing exist? Seems like there is a bunch of stuff out there for extracting image files to png, jpeg, etc, but nothing for extracting the images as PDFs. A strange request I know.

I am working with a large set of PDFs that contain images that are comprised of all kinds of different images formats, bitmaps, vectors, etc. If there was some way to programmatically pull out images as pdfs it would save me a lot of time.

Right now I am selecting a portion of the page in the PDF in acrobat pro, choosing to edit in illustrator, and then saving as PDF.

Very time consuming.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could use poppler 's pdfimages utility to extract all bitmap images as-is from a PDF. In a second step, you can convert these bitmaps back to PDFs. img2pdf seems like a good candidate for this.