How to get a picture out of a PDF

There are two ways, depending on whether you want one picture or all of them. In PDF by Zaweba, Edit > Copy a picture lets you click a single picture on the page and copies it at its own size, ready to paste. For every picture at once, File > Export > Every picture in the PDF saves each image on the pages as a separate file.

Both work offline on Windows, and neither changes the PDF you're taking the pictures from.

One picture: copy it

Say a brochure has a product photo you need for a presentation, or a report has a diagram you want in your notes. Open the PDF, choose Edit > Copy a picture, and click the picture. It goes onto the clipboard at its own size, meaning the size it's stored at in the PDF, not the size it happens to be drawn on your screen. Paste it into your document, slide or image editor.

That detail matters for quality. A photo might be shown small on the page but stored much larger in the file. Copying the picture itself gives you all of it, which is usually sharper than a screenshot would be.

Every picture: export them

When you want all the images, perhaps to reuse the photos from a catalogue or to keep the illustrations from an old document, copying them one by one is slow. Choose File > Export > Every picture in the PDF instead, and pick where to save them.

How each one is saved depends on how it was stored. JPEG pictures come out as they are, byte for byte, so there's no second round of compression and no loss. Other pictures are saved as PNG, which keeps every pixel. You get the images as they were put into the PDF, not a re-encoded copy.

One limit to know about: pictures inside form objects are not reached by the export. Most pictures sit directly on the page and come out fine, but if you notice one missing, Edit > Copy a picture or a snapshot will usually get it.

When it isn't really a picture

Not everything that looks like a picture in a PDF is stored as one. Charts, logos and diagrams are often drawn from lines and shapes, the same way text is, and there's no image inside to pull out. Neither command will find those, because there's nothing of that kind to find.

For drawn graphics, use Edit > Take a snapshot and drag round the area. That copies whatever is on the page as a picture, drawn or not. For a whole page as an image, File > Export can also save pages as PNG, JPEG or TIFF at a resolution you choose, from 72 to 600 dpi, which is the way to get a crisp copy of a drawn chart at a size you control.

The opposite case comes up with scans. A scanned document is often one big picture per page, so exporting every picture gives you each page as an image. That can be useful, but if you only wanted a photo that appears on the scanned page, a snapshot of that area is the quicker route.

Using the pictures well

Pictures in other people's documents still belong to someone. Taking images out of your own files, or files you have permission to reuse, is the everyday case, and it's what the tools are there for.

Name and sort the exported files before you forget which document they came from. Export into a new empty folder for each PDF, so pictures from different files don't mix together.

And if the goal is a smaller PDF rather than the pictures themselves, you don't need to extract anything. PDF by Zaweba has a Reduce file size command for that job.

PDF by Zaweba is free software, with no account and no uploading, so the pictures you take out stay on your own computer.