How can I remove all images from a PDF?

Question

I want to remove all images from a PDF file.

The page layouts should not change. All images should be replaced by empty space.

• How can this be achieved with the help of Ghostscript and the appropriate PostScript code?

Answer 1

Meanwhile the latest Ghostscript releases have a much nicer and easier to use method of removing all images from a PDF. The parameter to add to the command line is -dFILTERIMAGE

 gs -o noimages.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERIMAGE input.pdf

Even better, you can also remove all text or all vector drawing elements from a PDF by specifying -dFILTERTEXT or -dFILTERVECTOR.

Of course, you can also combine any combination of these -dFILTER* parameters you want in order to achieve a required result. (Combining all three will of course result in "empty" pages.)

Here is the screenshot from an example PDF page which contains all 3 types of content mentioned above:

---

_{Screenshot of original PDF page containing "image", "vector" and "text" elements.}

---

Running the following 6 commands will create all 6 possible variations of remaining contents:

 gs -o noIMG.pdf   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERIMAGE                input.pdf
 gs -o noTXT.pdf   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERTEXT                 input.pdf
 gs -o noVCT.pdf   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERVECTOR               input.pdf

 gs -o onlyTXT.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERVECTOR -dFILTERIMAGE input.pdf 
 gs -o onlyIMG.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERVECTOR -dFILTERTEXT  input.pdf
 gs -o onlyVCT.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERIMAGE  -dFILTERTEXT  input.pdf

The following image illustrates the results:

---

_{Top row, from left: all "text" removed; all "images" removed; all "vectors" removed. Bottom row, from left: only "text" kept; only "images" kept; only "vectors" kept.}

---