Browsing Images in PDF File in a Folder-Like View

[whitepage]

Would anyone happen to know of software that lets you browse the assets in a PDF file (particularly the images) in a kind of "folder view"? Something that lets you, for instance, easily select many image thumbnails in one go and delete them from the file? Or sort the images in the file by width, height or kB, in order to target the ones needed for deletion / extraction / resampling?

To delete multiple images, I know you can use a PitStop Action List: for instance to select all images in a page range, or to select all images which have one dimension over a number of pixels. That's useful, but still not a very precise way of targeting images for selection. For instance in PitStop you can't specify that the height of images to be selected equals 1000 pixels (the Action List field is "width OR height").

It would be ideal to see all image assets in a GUI from which you can select various actions–such as deleting, resampling and extracting.

Hoping that some of you experts here know about a program that does this or will be able to share some insights. In advance, thank you.

 

[mattbeals]

I believe you can do that kind of selection in pitstop with an action list. But why?

 

[abc]

Interesting use case, like Matt I would be interested to know whey you are looking for this kind of functionality?

Then we might be able to suggest a solution or how to create an Action List

 

[whitepage]

Hi guys, thank you for your replies!

You both mentioned action lists, so to clarify my original post that may not have been clear, it tried to explain that in my understanding an action list would not fill this particular need because:
- you cannot target images precisely. For instance, I can create an action list that selects all images on pages in the range "3-5,120-123" (useful), but I cannot create an action list that selects, for instance, images with a height of 1000 pixels (for some reason PitStop only lets you do "width OR height equals 1000 pixels")
- what I am looking for is a way to graphically browse all image assets, much like in a thumbnail view when viewing files in an OS. This makes is easy to sort assets, select them, then act on them.

Use Cases

You both asked: why?

There are several use cases for wanting to browse image assets in a file then act on a selection (rather than having to select images one by one on each page). For instance:

1. You receive a file with many images, some of which must be removed (for instance portraits, or certain symbols). The images that must be removed cannot be described by a page range or by "width OR height", but when you see them you immediately know they are a portrait or symbol, so they would be easy to select in a thumbnail view.

2. You are working with a scan of an old text. The scan contains grainy images of each page's background (the text having already been isolated with ClearScan), as well as images that need to be kept. You want to remove all these useless backgrounds, but they may live on the same pages as useful images, so you cannot just select all images in a page range using an action list. On the other hand, once you see the image assets in a folder view, you immediately know which images are a background.

3. You want to extract all images of a certain kind (e.g. portrait, symbol) from a document.

4. You want to resample all images of a certain kind.

Extracting all images to individual files is not a problem. For instance, on Windows, you can use the pdfextract utility provided with old version of MuPDF. But the need in the use cases above is (1) not limited to extraction, but also manipulation within the document (removal, resampling), and (2) for selective, rather than global, targeting of assets.

For these reasons I was hoping that the feature to browse all image assets in a file in a folder-like view must be present in one of the hundreds of PDF-related software available... But maybe not? If not, it would be an interesting feature suggestion for packages such as Acrobat and Abbyy–and of course PitStop, though that would step out of the program's workflow paradigm.

 

[leonardr]

- what I am looking for is a way to graphically browse all image assets, much like in a thumbnail view when viewing files in an OS. This makes is easy to sort assets, select them, then act on them.

Is the goal to act on them INSIDE the PDF - or to extract them from the PDF and then act on them?

Extracting all images to individual files is not a problem.

You know that feature has been in Adobe Acrobat for over a decade, right? No need for other tools.

 

[whitepage]

Is the goal to act on them INSIDE the PDF

Yes, inside the PDF (see the Use Cases in the previous message). Remove selected images from the PDF, resample them… and potentially other features if available (tweak brightness etc.) Looking for software or an Acrobat plugin with that feature.
Acrobat lets you act on images one by one, or all at once. It would be beautiful if it allowed to "browse" all images in one place so we can act on a selection.

You know that feature has been in Adobe Acrobat for over a decade

I know about the Export All Images feature in Document Processing, but I didn't know how long it had been there, no. I tend to turn to pdfextract because
- it's on my system path so I can run it from the command line without opening a document (a matter of preference)
- it also extracts fonts, which is occasionally handy when working with ClearScans if a glyph needs to be tweaked.
But that's off-topic, I should not have mentioned Extracting All images.
The question is about selecting multiple images within a PDF document in order to act on these images within the document.

 

[leonardr]

Yes, inside the PDF (see the Use Cases in the previous message).

It wasn't clear, that's why I asked.

I am aware of software that would let you browse them for the purposes of extraction (and then external processing), but nothing that will do it for the purposes of internal modification.

 

[whitepage]

It wasn't clear, that's why I asked.

Ha, my bad. Sometimes things that seem clear to me do not come across. Writing is hard.

nothing that will do it for the purposes of internal modification

Thank you very much for letting me know.

I hope someone else has heard of such a plug-in or product.

 

[whitepage]

Update: for the record, having made a few inquiries elsewhere, so far I haven't heard of anything with that feature.
That surprises me as there seems to be hundreds of PDF-related programs and plug-ins, but maybe that's how it is.