Extract bitmaps from Word documents

Question

Some people can't be convinced to send screenshots as pictures. Instead they paste the screenshots into a Word document and send that document. It is possible to right click a bitmap in Word and choose "Save as picture...", but it's too much work for many bitmaps.

Therefore I'm looking for a tool that can extract bitmaps in their original resolution from a Word document. It should work offline on Windows 7 x64 and be gratis. It can be a command line tool.

Answer 1

Syncfusion provides file parsing libraries for Word - Essential DocIO that can also be used for this purpose.

Example

private void ExtractImagesFromWordDocument(string inputFilePath,string outputFolderLocation)
    {
        //Create Word document instance.
        WordDocument document = new WordDocument();
        //Open Existing Word document
        document.Open(inputFilePath);

        int index = 0;
        foreach (var item in document.Visit())
        {
            //If the entity is picture then save at particular location
            if (item.EntityType == EntityType.Picture)
            {
                WPicture pic = (WPicture)item;
                pic.Image.Save(outputFolderLocation + "Image" + index + ".png", ImageFormat.Png);
                index++;
            }
        }
        document.Close();
    }

The whole suite of controls and libraries is available for free through the community license program if you qualify (less than 1 million USD in revenue). Note: I work for Syncfusion.

Answer 2

Perhaps I'm a bit impatient and I should wait for an answer for a longer time, but I just had the need to get this done...

Using the great but hardly documented DocX library for C# I was able to solve that task and create a small console application that extracts all images from a document into a folder. According to my short tests, all images are in PNG format when pasted from clipboard.

The following code works for .docx files only, which is ok for me.

using System;
using System.IO;
using Novacode;

namespace BmpFromDocx
{
    static class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length < 2)
            {
                PrintHelp();
                return;
            }
            var doc = DocX.Load(args[0]);
            var index = 0;
            foreach (var image in doc.Images)
            {
                var stream = image.GetStream(FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
                var buffer = new byte[stream.Length];
                stream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
                File.WriteAllBytes(Path.Combine(args[1], $"image{index}.png"), buffer);
                index++;
            }
        }

        private static void PrintHelp()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Usage: BmpFromDocx <docx> <output path>");
        }
    }
}