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"Here's a summary of best practices for Python PDF to image conversion in 2025:\n\n## Two Main Libraries\n\n### 1. **pdf2image** (with Poppler)\npdf2image is a wrapper around the pdftoppm and pdftocairo command line tools to convert PDF to a PIL Image list.(no content)pdf2image needs Poppler or Ghostscript as external dependencies.\n\n**Installation:**\n- On Mac, install Poppler via Homebrew. Most Linux distributions have pdftoppm and pdftocairo pre-installed. If not, use `sudo apt-get install poppler-utils` for Ubuntu\/Debian. You can also install Poppler via conda on any platform.\n- For Windows, download Poppler and add the bin\/ folder to PATH or use `poppler_path = r\"C:\\path\\to\\poppler-xx\\bin\"` as an argument in convert_from_path.\n\n### 2. **PyMuPDF (fitz)**\nPyMuPDF is faster and more lightweight. It doesn't need external tools. Choose PyMuPDF for speed and simplicity.(no content)Note that PyMuPDF doesn't require any additional libraries as the PDF2Image package does.\n\n## Performance Best Practices\n\nFor **pdf2image**:\n- Using an output folder is significantly faster if you are using an SSD. Otherwise i\/o usually becomes the bottleneck.\n- Using multiple threads can give you some gains but avoid more than 4 as this will cause i\/o bottleneck.\n- If i\/o is your bottleneck, using the JPEG format can lead to significant gains. PNG format is pretty slow due to the compression.\n- The `use_pdftocairo` parameter forces pdf2image to use pdftocairo, which should improve performance.\n- For large PDF files, the conversion may take longer or run out of memory. Try reducing the DPI setting in the convert_from_path function (e.g., `pages = convert_from_path('sample.pdf', 150)`).\n\n## Code Examples\n\n**PyMuPDF approach:**\n```python\nimport fitz # PyMuPDF\n\ndef pdf_to_images(pdf_path, output_prefix):\n doc = fitz.open(pdf_path)\n for i, page in enumerate(doc):\n pix = page.get_pixmap()\n pix.save(f\"{output_prefix}_{i}.png\")\n```\n\n**pdf2image approach:**\n```python\nfrom pdf2image import convert_from_path\n\nimages = convert_from_path('sample.pdf', dpi=200)\nfor i, image in enumerate(images):\n image.save(f'page_{i}.jpg', 'JPEG')\n```\n\n## Recommendations\n\n- pdf2image offers more format options, while PyMuPDF excels in speed and ease of setup\n- Use **PyMuPDF** if you want simpler installation without external dependencies\n- Use **pdf2image** if you need specific Poppler features or already have Poppler installed"
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