How to easily extract images from a Word Document

Mon, May 17 2010

Sometimes when I ask people to email pictures for a site, instead of just attaching them or using an awesome application like Picasa, they put them in a Word doc.   After some trial and error (if you right click on the image, copy, paste into PhotoShop it is rendered in a strange posterized way)  I found that if you simply save the file as html, all the images are saved in a filename_files directory.  Full disclosure:  I am still running Office 03 because I don’t do enough Word Processing to justify an upgrade.

Here are the steps to painlessly get all those document images out of the doc,  in full resolution:

1. Open the file in Word. Then go to File > Save as Web Page…
2. Select “Web Page (*.htm, *.html)” under save as type (not Single File Web Page)
3. Notice the directory it’s being saved in…
4. Open that directory and you’ll see a folder called documentfilename_files with all the photos/images from the document in it! Hooray!!