We have a crossplatfrom (Windows, Linux, OS X, App Engine) Python application using reportlab to create PDF files, which include thumbnails (as seen in Acrobat Reader).
Is there a way to extract these thumbnails from the PDF file for document managment purposes (without rendering the pages themself with Ghostscript, MuPDF)?
PDF doesn't contain thumbnails so there is nothing to extract. You will have to use some 3rd library like Ghostscript or MuPDF to rasterize each page.