How can I extract images and their metadata from PDFs?

itext, java, pdf, pdfbox

Solution

Images do not contain metadata and are stored as raw data which needs to be assemebled into images. I wrote 2 blog posts explaining how image data is stored in a PDF file at https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/04/understanding-the-pdf-file-format-how-are-images-stored/ and https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/09/understanding-the-pdf-file-format-images/

Problem

Is it possible to use Java to extract images from a PDF file and export them to a specific folder without losing their original creation and modification dates? I tried to achieve this goal by using IText and PDFBox but had no success. Any ideas or examples are welcome.

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