How to extract clipped images from PDF file in Java

Mark Stephens

4 years ago

PDF files are not directly supported by Java. This tutorial shows you how to extract clipped images from a PDF file in 5 simple steps using the JPedal PDF library.

Why use a third-party library to handle PDF files?

PDF files are a very complex binary/text hybrid data structure. The image data, color information, clipping and scaling details are all stored separately in a compressed format and need to be extracted and combined together.

A third-party library handles all the for you automatically. In this example, we will use our JPedal PDF library. This provides an easy to use Java PDF APi so you can work with PDF files easily in Java.

How to Extract clipped images from PDF files with JPedal?

Create a File handle, InputStream, or URL pointing to the PDF file
```
ExtractClippedImages extract = new ExtractClippedImages(path);
```
Include a password if file password protected
```
extract.setPassword("password");
```
Open the PDF file
```
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
```

Iterate over the images on each page

  int pageCount = extract.getPageCount();
  for (int page = 1; page <= pageCount; page++) {

    int imagesOnPageCount = extract.getImageCount(page);
      for (int image = 0; image < imagesOnPageCount; image++) {
        BufferedImage img = extract.getClippedImage(page, 
        image, true);
      }
   }
 }

Close the PDF file
```
 extract.closePDFfile();
```

JPedal makes it easy to extract clipped images from PDF files

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