Extracting an Embedded Photograph from MS-Word

Perhaps this is something millions of people already know, but it’s new to me. Suppose you have an MS-Word document with an embedded photograph, and you would like to transport the photograph to a web page as a JPEG image. Since the photo doesn’t exist apart from the MS-Word document, how do you do this?

I needed to do this for the Longwood University Physics blog. I have a nice photograph of the University’s first physics graduate, but it’s embedded in an MS-Word document. I wanted the photograph for a blog article. My first guess was to select the photo and copy it. Next, I opened Adobe Photoshop and selected File, then New from the top menu bar. This opened a window into which I could paste the photograph. But apparently not all the pixels are carried over in this operation. The result is washed out, or however you’re supposed to describe it. It doesn’t look right. But have no fear, dear reader. Eventually, MS-Office came to the rescue.

Princess Leia was not our first physics graduate, but I’ll use her photograph as an example. Here’s a reasonably good photo:

But suppose you have this photo only as an object embedded in an MS-Word document. When copied and pasted to Adobe Photoshop, and saved as a JPEG, here’s what you get:

This is unbecoming a princess. A Google search on “extracting a photograph from a Word document” brings up all sorts of complicated stuff about CorelDraw, which I don’t have and don’t want, or the old MS-Photo Editor, which disappeared when Windows 98 was shelved, I think. But I found a quick way to do it:

Open MS-Front Page, the Office web page editor that reminds you how thoroughly wonderful DreamWeaver really is. Open a new untitled web page, and just copy and paste the photo into the document. You’ll get all the usual indecipherable junk that Front Page creates in the raw HTML code, but you’ll also get the image in jpeg format. When you save the file, MS-Front Page will create a folder in the same directory you’re working in; that new direction will contain the Jpeg image. Problem solved! You can move the image to another directory and delete the web page and folder.

So here are the steps:

1. Open the MS-Word document with the embedded photograph.
2. Click on the photograph and copy it to the clipboard.
3. Open MS-Front Page and create a new html document
4. Paste the photograph into the document. Save the document.
5. In the same folder that you saved the document, look for a folder named after the html document itself. In that folder will be a nice jpeg of your image.

Will DreamWeaver do this? Maybe. Let me know.

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