Image Manipulation in Python:
Convert PDFs to Images

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The package pdf2image can be used to convert PDFs to PIL image objects which can then be saved as .png files or similar.

1 Installation

• Head to the pdf2image package’s PyPI page
• Follow the instructions on installing poppler which are reproduced here:
  • Windows: install poppler for Windows, then add the bin folder to PATH
  • macOS: install poppler for macOS
  • Linux: most distros ship with pdftoppm and pdftocairo. If they are not installed, refer to your package manager to install poppler-utils
• Open terminal and install pdf2image with pip install pdf2image
• Check that it has worked by running python to open Python in the terminal then import pdf2image to check that there are no errors

2 Usage

In Python use:

from pdf2image import convert_from_path

to import the convert_from_path function, then:

images = convert_from_path('/path/to/example.pdf')

to import the pages of a PDF as a list of PIL image objects. These can then be saved to your computer as images with:

images[idx].save('example.png')

where idx is the page number (starting at 0) of the page you want to save as an image.

3 Convert All in Folder

The following script will convert all PDF files that are in the same folder as the script into PNG files and delete the PDFs. Note that no other files can be in the folder; only the PDFs and this script:

"""Convert all pdfs in a folder into pngs."""
import os
from pdf2image import convert_from_path

# Create a list with the names of the files in the folder
files = os.listdir()
# Remove this file
files.remove(os.path.basename(__file__))
# Remove hidden files
files_old = files
for filename in files_old:
    if filename[0] == '.':
        files.remove(filename)
# Remove directories
files_new = []
for i in range(len(files)):
    if not os.path.isdir(files[i]):
        files_new.append(files[i])
files = files_new
files = sorted(files)
# Convert each file to png and save it
for file in files:
    images = convert_from_path(file)
    # This is a list, so extract just the image
    images = images[0]
    # Remove extension
    filename = file.split('.')[0]
    images.save(filename + '.png')
    # Delete original file
    os.remove(file)

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