Have you ever received photos in a PDF? Or any other things inside one, which are impossible to use, because of the expensive proprietor application marketed by Adobe?
Actually there is a suite of free (as in beer) and free (as in permission) applications under the name of SomePDF which can do this job.
They can be installed to a Windows computer. But the directory structure will work in stand-alone mode too.
We had some photos of grandchildren sent to us as pdf's which were obviously real images. I was told by people in the image processing image that the pdf format is not supported by their kiosk machines, but that there are applications available to extract the files.
An afternoon was spent looking. And looking.
In the end I found a suite of applications for manipulating PDF contents, from a crowd called SomePDF.
The one for extracting images was very effective. I point you to where I have saved two pdfs and the separated jpgs for you to see how effective it is. However someone may say I'm "self-promoting". Oh well, so be it 
http://oldzipsarchive.dyndns.org/PDF-to-whatever/SomePDF_samples
I wrote to the author of the software, explaining I wished to publicise his software through the PortableApps concept and asking would he be prepared to give copyright permission to do so. The original emails can be sent to John or whoever - but there appears to be no link on portableapps.com website to do this.
Here is SomePDF's reply...
- Hello Richard Ashton,
Yes, the permission is possible. We only need preserve our website and copyright. Thanks!
Best regards,
SomePDF.com
support@somepdf.com
2009-06-24
The applications available are:
PDF to html translation
PDF to text translation
PDF to Word .doc translation
PDF to image extraction
and ASCII text file to PDF translation
It would be good to be allowed to post the directory structure, but last time I tried doing this I got burned. So that means everybody who wants to try it has to spend time downloading and installing, notwithstanding permission being given.
Not my problem.
Richard in Adelaide
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but can not see big use for everyday work in it. While there are many commercial attempts to make for example pdf to word converter, this one will convert it, but if fonts are not embedded, then all ends up in terrible mess, number of texts printed over each other, characters of different sizes on one line, picture printed over text and vice versa, well it is freeware after all.
It may work on very simple documents, but as soon as it is more complex, having tables and some other special objects, this all fails to convert it so it is anything nearly useful.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland