Remove PDF images on your computer

Remove photos, scans and background images while keeping text and vector content for a lighter, print-friendly PDF. Your files stay on your device.

100% private: everything runs on your computer, your files never leave your device.

  1. Add one or more PDFs
  2. Remove embedded images locally
  3. Download one clean PDF per input, or a ZIP for a batch

What Remove PDF images does

Remove PDF images strips the embedded pictures out of a PDF and leaves everything else in place: text, tables, vector drawings, links and page layout. Photos, logos, scanned backgrounds and decorative banners disappear; what remains is a lighter, print-friendly document that uses far less ink. The processing runs entirely inside your browser.

It is useful whenever the images are the problem rather than the content: a catalogue you only need the price tables from, a manual with full-page photographs that you want to print in draft, a presentation exported to PDF with a heavy background on every slide, or a document you want to share without its pictures. There are no settings to learn; the tool does one thing and does it immediately.

How to remove images from a PDF

  1. Add your PDF. With a single file the removal starts right away, without an options screen.
  2. Wait a moment while the tool walks through every page and locates the embedded images. Progress is shown as Removing images locally.
  3. Download the result. The new file has the suffix _without_images and a timestamp, and the original on your disk is untouched.
  4. To clean several PDFs in one run, add them all before starting: you get one clean PDF per input inside a ZIP. Batch runs are part of the 7-Day Pass and the Pro plan.

What is removed and what stays

PDF pages reference their pictures as image objects. The tool finds every one of those objects, including the ones hidden inside nested form objects, replaces the reference with an empty placeholder so the page still renders correctly, and then deletes the image data from the file. Text and vector content are not modified at all.

Privacy: images are stripped on your computer

The PDF is read and rewritten by a PDF library running in your browser tab. The file is never uploaded, no page is sent anywhere for analysis and no third-party script is loaded. The only download involved is OléPDF's own code from its own domain. Once the tab is closed, the only copies of the document are the ones on your disk.

That also means there is no upload size to worry about: a large document takes a little longer to process locally, but it never has to travel.

Typical uses

Frequently asked questions

Is removing images from a PDF free?

Yes. The tool is free and unlimited for one PDF at a time, with no account and no watermark. Processing several PDFs in a single run requires the 7-Day Pass or Pro.

Will the text still be selectable afterwards?

Yes. Text, fonts and vector content are left untouched, so the document remains searchable and selectable exactly as before.

Can I choose which images to remove?

No. The tool removes every embedded image in the document. To delete a single picture, open the file in Edit PDF and remove that object by hand.

What happens with a scanned PDF?

Each scanned page is itself an image, so removing images leaves empty pages. If you want the text of a scan, use OCR first, then extract the text or keep the OCR version.

Why did the file not get much smaller?

Because the images were small or the PDF's size comes from fonts, vector artwork or attachments. Only image data is dropped here; Compress PDF can reduce the rest.

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Photos rather than PDFs? Try OléPIC, our image tools.