24May/110
How to Extract Images from a Microsoft Word Document
Why would you need to extract images from a Word document? You saved the originals, right? Right? No? Me either. Or maybe you did direct copy-and-paste composition, taking images directly from your web browser. For whatever reason, now you need your images back and don't have the sources.
This is not a common use case, so Word doesn't make it easy for you. Fortunately, there is a simple (though non-obvious) process for getting the sources back:
- Export the document as a "Web page with supporting files".
- This will save all embedded images (and their original forms, if they've been modified) to a folder in the same directory as your exported HTML file.
- Note that the folder and files are linked to the HTML file, so moving it around may have unintended consequences.
- Look inside the 'supporting files' folder and find the image(s) you want to use.
- Copy the image(s) to another location to break their link to the exported HTML file.
That's it! Your source images will even be in the same format as they were originally.