Export all images from a Word (.doc) document .. and rename them
During the summer, I faced a challenging task for the book: “…and also, if you could hand us all the images in the book, thank you very much. Oh yeah, if you could name them CH01_01.png, CH01_02.png, etc., it would be great.”
Yes, I felt a bit overwhelmed.
Since Kanban In Action now spans 13 chapters in different .doc files, I immediately realized two things:
- Marcus, you’re foolish for not tracking these images somewhere.
- This is too massive to handle manually.
This post details how I tackled the problem. It took me about 2 hours in total.
Export all files in a Word document
The chapters are written in .doc format (for some reason), but I remembered that the newer format .docx is essentially just a zip-file. Maybe, just maybe, that could help me.
- I saved the file as .docx.
- Then I renamed the file to .zip and extracted the archive to a folder.
- Lo and behold; in the [Name of your Word document]/word/media-folder, all the images were listed, in the order they appeared in the document.
The only downside, if you could call it that, was that the files were named: image1.png, image2.png, etc. That was the next task:
Renaming a lot of files (on macOS)
I now had all the files from all the documents, in separate folders. That amounted to about 300 pictures. Yeah - Kanban in Action is graphic-heavy!
Renaming 300 pictures by hand was out of the question. Remember, they wanted each file to be named [chapter number]_[sequence number in chapter].png. So, I found this awesome video that shows how to do that with Automator.
Here are the steps I followed:
- Start Automator.
- Choose New -> Application.
- Search for “Rename Finder Items” and click OK.
- Select “Don’t add” in the dialog that asks if you want to create copies of the file. I didn’t since I wanted to rename them.
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In the drop-down, select “Replace text” and set up your replacement settings. Here’s my example:
- Save the application to a well-known place, for example, the desktop.
You have now created a little renamer application. To it, you can drag the files you want to rename and … presto - they will be renamed.