I’m sure most of you know of what I speak. You’re waiting for the pictures of your client to incorporate them into your design. You have everything ready, the reserved space, and the precise dimensions. You do not care if the work is a web or a graphic design or even an editorial job. You need that logo, those images. There comes an email. It’s your client.
Subject: images.
You open it and … damn it! The images are all within a Word document, so you have to extract them out of there.
Why send a picture in a Word?
Honestly I see no logical reason. The file weight of the text document and the image weight are very similar. Moreover, the user had to create a new file and import the images, which has taken longer to prepare. It’s a mystery…
Among the mystery is solved, we have a few options: either asking your client to convert the image format to jpg, png…or trying to get the images out of Word via copy and paste in Photoshop / Gimp (or whatever you use), or saving the images as pdf and then open them in Illustrator … designer tricks.
Solution: Extracting Images from Word without Losing Quality
Well, finally a solution with satisfactory results for these troubles: to save the document as a web page. Yes, that simple. Let’s see step by step:
1. Open the text document containing the images. (If you are using Word, open Office, and if you are working with Mac, iWorks)
2. Once opened, go to the menu and find the option “Save As”
3. Among the options available under “Other formats” select “Web Page (htm, html)”
4. This will save the document in an html file and a folder associated with this file. All images containing the file in this folder will be at the highest quality.
The process is very simple. What makes a text processor is to convert the file to a web page; therefore it creates an html with references to images by keeping their order. But they are references to images, so they are not embedded. Therefore, it is necessary to place the images in a folder near the html file (such as assets when we are packaging a web design). So we already have the images that were within the Word document in image format (jpg or png)
Although as you see the process is very simple, my advice is not to let your clients send you the content as they wish. Try to make an agreement from the beginning on work rules and sending files (client and design team). For example, with the images:
“The images will be sent separately in jpg format with the minimum resolution of 900 px wide or 600px high, through the shared Dropbox folder for the project…”
Trust me, this will save you time and headaches in the future.
A little more about images
If your client’s images are blurry, they are not of sufficient quality or do not satisfy you for any reason, suggest the client using a stock images to find images that convince both. As we talk sometimes, the use of images is essential today in design works, for example, it can optimize the time spent at our page in web design or influence on user navigation.
Perfect, I hope this mini tutorial was useful. Now you can spend time on what really matters: your work! Regards 😉
PS: I leave you an interesting project about the designer’s dilemmas vs the clients and the uses of jpg: the best vector! nojpg.org
My wife came to me this morning completely puzzled on how to extract images from an MS Word doc. I know my way around Word pretty well so I thought, “This should be easy.” Famous last words particularly when tackling a Microsoft product.
Your advice to “Save as…” html made me a hero for the day. I never could have figured that out on my own.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!