How to extract images from a Word Document

After Googling this question and being disappointed at how much work was needed to find a good answer, the only useful post was this old post[1] for Word 2007, here is a definitive blog post about the topic. This post assumes use of a Microsoft Word 2013 though the method would work on almost any word processor.

The by far simplest method is to save the document as a webpage. This is done by choosing the correct file type when saving as a new file. This is done as normal when saving the file but choosing a different "save as type". Below is a screenshot of saving a document called "Example".

The save screen when saving the document.
The save screen when saving the document. Click to view full size.

Next, simply navigate to the folder where you saved the document as a webpage and you should find a new folder called "Example_files" alongside the new .htm file. Inside the folder will be every photo within the document in a .jpg format along with some meta data and other stuff you dont need to worry about.

Hooray!

Footnotes

  1. Link to older blog post on this subject. It goes into other methods including opening the .docx as a .zip and manually saving each image. However, these are much less time efficient.