5 Python libraries to convert PDF to Images (Code Example)

One of the most popular open source OCR software is Google's Tesseract. It takes in images as input and gives back machine encoded text…

Prithivee Ramalingam

Level Up Coding

· ~4 min read · August 3, 2022 (Updated: July 24, 2023) · Free: Yes

One of the most popular open source OCR software is Google's Tesseract. It takes in images as input and gives back machine encoded text. While I was going through Tesseract's documentation, I found that tesseract only accepts images as input. So, I needed a way to convert my pdf files to images. While surfing, I came across 5python libraries which can convert pdf to images. This made me think, why not write an article about these libraries with installation and code walkthrough. So here it is.

1. IronPDF

IronPDF for Python is a powerful library developed by Iron Software, offering software engineers the capability to create, edit, and extract PDF content in Python 3 projects. IronPdf for Python is free to use and to test in development environments, with an IronPDF watermark, applied. To use in live projects and remove the watermark purchase a license. There is a free 30-day Trial license also available.

One notable advantage of IronPDF is its optimization for performance through full multithreading and asynchronous support, enabling efficient processing of large volumes of data. Additionally, IronPDF offers advanced capabilities such as adding headers/footers, signatures, attachments, and passwords for enhanced PDF security.

pip install ironpdf

Convert PDF to Image using IronPDF:

from ironpdf import *
pdf = PdfDocument.FromFile("my-content.pdf")


# Extract all pages to a folder as image files
pdf.RasterizeToImageFiles("assets/images/*.png",DPI=96)

In the above example, the output images will be saved in the "assets/images" folder within your project. Prior to running the program, please ensure that you have created this folder. The image files will be named starting from 1 and will be incremented for each page of the PDF document.

In case the output images appear blurry, you can consider increasing the DPI (dots per inch) value. This is one of the main advantages of working with IronPDF as you can customize the image resolution according to your specific requirements. However, note that this may result in longer rendering times.

OUTPUT:

Image by Author

IronPDF for Python offers more than just PDF-to-image conversion. It also enables you to create images directly from URLs and HTML sources. You can find the documentation of PDF to Image conversion on the IronPDF website.

2. Pdf2image

Pdf2image is a python module that wraps pdftoppm and pdftocairo to convert PDF to a PIL Image object. pdf2image supports 2 methods to convert pdf to images. The first one is convert_from_path which takes the path of the pdf file as an input. The second one is convert_from_bytes which accepts bytes as the input. The latter can be used for production ready code as we can directly read the pdf as bytes from cloud storage. This removes the risk of downloading the pdf to your system.

pip install pdf2image

Prerequisites:

Windows — To install pdf2image in Windows we require the poppler binary file for windows. After downloading the poppler file we need to provide the path of the bin folder.
Linux — To install pdf2image in Linux we can use the conda forge command to install poppler.

conda install -c conda-forge poppler

3. Pypdfium2

pypdfium2 is a Python 3 binding to PDFium, the liberal-licensed PDF rendering library authored by Foxit and maintained by Google.

Installation of pypdfium2 is straightforward and doesn't require any dependencies.

pip3 install –no-build-isolation -U pypdfium2

4. PyMuPDF or Fitz

PyMuPDF is a Python binding for MuPDF — "a lightweight PDF and XPS viewer". A PDF file can be converted into a number of image formats using PyMuPDF. The created image can be enlarged or diminished based on the Matrix function. The value of zoom can be configured to achieve the expected size.

pip install PyMuPDF==1.16.14

5. Pdf2jpg

Pdf2jpg is a python library which can be used to convert PDF to images. We need to provide the input and output paths for pdf and images respectively.

pip install pdf2jpg

Conclusion:

Among the 5 libraries discussed, IronPDF is my personal favorite as it allows seamless conversion of HTML, URLs, JavaScript, CSS, and various image formats into PDFs. Notably, IronPDF is a licensed library, ensuring legal usage and compliance with relevant regulations. Its licensing model provides users with the assurance of support, updates, and maintenance.

It is important for users to evaluate their specific use case requirements and choose the library that best aligns with their needs, including considering factors such as functionality, licensing, performance, and support.