extract images from PDF with PHP

You can use pdfimages and install it this way:

apt install poppler-utils

Then use it this way to get all the images as PNG files:

pdfimages -j mypdf.pdf image -png

Images will be placed in the same folder under image-000.png, image-001.png, etc.

There are many options available, including some to change the output format, more information here.

I hope this helps!


AFAIK, there is no PHP module to do it. There is a command line tool, pdfimages (part of xpdf). For reference, here's how that works:

pdfimages -j source.pdf image

Which will extract all images from source.pdf as image-000.jpg, image-001.jpg, etc. Note the output format is always Jpeg.

Possible Options

Being a command line tool, you need exec (or system, passthru, any of the command executing functions built into PHP). As your environment doesn't have that, I see four options:

  1. Beg that exec be turned on for you (your hosting provider can limit what you can exec to a single command)
  2. Change the design -- how about a ZIP upload?
  3. Roll your own, using the source code of pdfimages as a model
  4. Let pdfimages do the heavy lifting, by running it on a remote host you do control

Regarding #3, rolling your own, I don't think rolling your own, to solve a very narrow definition of requirements, would be too difficult. I seem to recall that the image boundaries in PDF are well defined: just read in the file to a boundary, cut to the end of the boundary, base64_decode, and write to a file -- repeat. However, that may be too much...

If rolling your own is too complicated, then option #4 is kind of like what Joel Spolsky describes for working with complicated Excel objects (see the numbered list under the bold heading "Let Office do the heavy work for you").

  • Find a cheap hosting environment (eg Amazon EC2) that let's you exec and curl
  • Install pdfimages
  • Write a PHP script that takes a URL to a PDF, curl opens that PDF, writes it to disk, passes it to pdfimages, then returns the URL to the resulting images.

An example exchange could look like this:

GET http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?extract=http://www.limitedhost.com/path/to/uploaded.pdf

Content-type: text/html


<html>
<body>
<ul>
<li>http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?retrieve=ab9895v/image-000.jpg</li>
<li>http://www.cheaphost.com/pdfimages.php?retrieve=ab9895v/image-001.jpg</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

So your single pdfimages.php script (running on the host with the exec functionality) can both extract images, and give you access to the extracted images. When extracting, it reads a PDF you tell it, runs pdfimages on it, and gives you back a list of URL to call to retrieve the extracted images. When retrieving, it just gives you back a straight image.

You would need to deal with cleanup, perhaps the thing to do would be to delete the image after retrieval. You would also need to handle security -- don't know what's in these images, but the content might need to be wrapped in SSL and other precautions taken.

Tags:

Php

Image

Pdf

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