Extract images troubleshooting: no images found, password errors, and missing or blurry pictures

Extract images runs entirely in your browser — the PDF is never uploaded — so most problems come down to what's actually inside the file. Here are the common cases and how to fix them.

"This PDF is password-protected, so its images can't be read."

Cause: the PDF has an open password (it asks for a password before showing any pages), so nothing inside it — including the images — can be decoded.

1. Open Unlock and remove the password (you'll need to know it; AttachKit doesn't crack passwords).
2. Drop the unlocked copy back into Extract images and run it again.

"No embedded images were found in this PDF"

Cause: the document genuinely has no raster images that pass the filters. The usual reasons:

• It's a scanned PDF with a text layer. On a text-heavy page, a near-full-page image is treated as a rendered page background and dropped on purpose — otherwise you'd get a duplicate of every page.
• The graphics are vector artwork. Logos, charts and diagrams drawn as shapes and text aren't pixel images, so there's nothing to extract.
• The document is over 600 pages. Extraction is skipped on very large documents to keep your browser responsive, so the result comes back empty.

Fix:

1. If you want the pages themselves as images (scans, vector-heavy pages), use PDF → JPG — it saves every page as a picture.
2. For a document over 600 pages, split out the chapter you need with Pages first, then extract images from the smaller file.
3. If the scan has no selectable text and you actually wanted the text, run Searchable OCR instead.

An image you can see on the page is missing from the results

Cause: the tool deliberately filters out things that usually aren't "the pictures": graphics smaller than about 24 points per side (bullets, spacers, rules), exact duplicates painted at the same spot (tiled backgrounds), near-full-page images on text-heavy pages, and anything that isn't a raster image (vector logos and charts).

1. Check whether the "image" is selectable or scales without pixelating — if so, it's vector artwork and can't be extracted as a photo.
2. To capture a small icon or a filtered-out graphic, save the whole page with PDF → JPG and crop it in any image editor.

Extracted images look softer or smaller than the original

Cause: images are recovered by rendering each page and cropping the image regions out. The render runs at about 2× page scale, capped at 3000 pixels on the page's longest edge, and saves as JPEG. So you get the image at the size it was placed on the page, not the original camera-resolution file — a 4000-pixel photo shrunk into a small corner of the page comes out small.

1. For most uses (slides, docs, web) the 2× render is plenty; there's no setting to change.
2. If you have access to the source document (Word, InDesign, etc.), the original full-resolution image lives there.

Also note: output is JPEG, which has no transparency — transparent regions come out white, matching the page, never black.

"Couldn't extract images from this PDF — it may be corrupted or in an unsupported format."

Cause: the file can't be parsed as a PDF — often truncated by a bad download or email transfer, or not really a PDF (a renamed image or Word file).

1. Confirm the file opens in another PDF viewer. If it doesn't open anywhere, re-download or re-export it from the source.
2. If it's actually an image file, there's nothing to extract — you already have the image.
3. If it opens fine elsewhere but still fails here, report it — that's a case the team wants to see.

The extraction is slow or the tab feels stuck

Cause: every page that contains images is rendered in your browser, on your device — that's the privacy trade: no server farm, but your machine does the work.

1. Leave the tab in the foreground and give it a moment; the button shows "Extracting…" while it runs.
2. For a very long document, split off the section you need with Pages and extract from that.

Still stuck?

If none of these match what you're seeing, contact support and describe what happened — since your file never leaves your browser, support can't see it, so include the file's size, page count, and roughly how many images you expected.