Removing images from a PDF is useful for several reasons: reducing file size when images aren't needed, stripping sensitive diagrams before sharing a text-only version, or cleaning up a document that accumulated images during editing. The ease of removal depends on whether the images are embedded objects or part of the page background.
Two Types of Images in PDFs
Before choosing a removal method, identify what you're dealing with. Most images in PDFs fall into one of two categories:
- Embedded image objects: images placed as discrete objects in the PDF โ photos, logos, charts that were inserted into the document. These can be selected and deleted individually in a PDF Editor.
- Background images: images that form part of the page background or were flattened into the page โ scanned pages, watermark images merged into the content. These can't be selected separately because they're part of the page itself.
Quick test: open the PDF in Acrobat's Edit PDF mode and click on an image. If it selects as a separate object with a blue border, it's an embedded image object and can be deleted. If nothing selects or the whole page selects, it's part of the page background.
Deleting Images in Adobe Acrobat Pro
For embedded image objects, Acrobat Pro's Edit PDF mode is the most direct approach:
- Go to Tools > Edit PDF
- Click on the image you want to remove โ it should select with a blue border
- Press Delete โ the image is removed and the space it occupied becomes empty
- Save the file โ the image is permanently removed from the document
Removing an image leaves a gap in the layout โ the surrounding text doesn't reflow to fill the space. This is different from deleting in Word, where content adjusts. In a PDF, the image is gone but the whitespace it occupied remains. If you need to remove the gap as well, cover it with a white rectangle or go back to the source document.
Removing All Images at Once
For removing all images from a PDF in one operation โ to create a text-only version for archiving or lightweight sharing โ the print-to-PDF approach is fastest. Open the PDF, go to File > Print, and in the print settings look for an option to print without images or to print in text-only mode. Save to PDF.
Alternatively, in Acrobat Pro's PDF Optimizer (File > Save As Other > Optimized PDF), the Images section lets you downsample or discard images entirely while keeping all text. This produces a dramatically smaller file โ a PDF Compression approach that goes further than standard compression by removing image data altogether rather than just reducing its quality.
When to Remove Images in the Source Document
If the source document is available โ Word, PowerPoint, InDesign โ removing images there and re-exporting produces a cleaner result than removing them from the PDF. The text reflows properly to fill the space, and there are no awkward gaps. The exported PDF contains only what you included, with no image remnants or placeholder whitespace.
This is especially true when you want a text-only PDF that still looks professionally formatted โ not just a text PDF with blank spaces where images used to be. Removing images from the source and re-exporting gives you a properly composed text document rather than a document with holes.
How Much File Size Removing Images Saves
Images are the primary driver of PDF File Size โ a text-only PDF is a fraction of the size of one with embedded photos. Removing a single large image from a PDF can reduce the file size by several megabytes. For a presentation-style PDF with many images, removing all images might reduce the file from 30MB to under 500KB. The exact saving depends on image resolution and count, but image removal is the single most impactful way to shrink a PDF that contains photographic content.