MainelyDesign.com Blog

Getting Full Resolution Pictures out of MS Word (almost)

Posted on 04/29/2009 at 11:14 am by Kevin Wentworth
Viewed 14,335 times | 1 comment

People use what they know.  Most of the time I get photos embedded in an MS Word document for use on a web site.  My workaround to date has been to enlarge the picture (in Word) until it is as big as it gets (keeping quality) or the size I need.  I would then do a print screen and paste into Photoshop. 

I knew that there had to be a better way, but at least I was getting as much resolution as possible from the photo/picture.  Well I came across an interesting scenario today- I couldn't enlarge the photo.  I don't know if formatting was locked on it, but I didn't have time to fiddle with it.  Instead I searched for a way to export embedded photos at full resolution and found this thread.

Have you ever tried to right-click and copy a picture from Word and paste into Photoshop?  It looks like crap!  It's almost looks like a 16-color bitmap.  What an asinine default behavior- M$ should at least give an option of what resolution to copy the image as.  Of course, if you paste the image in another word document it will look great, but the minute you bring it out of the Office family... puke!  It's like M$ is tampering with the clipboard for no apparent reason and at the cost of interoperability.

Well, my great workaround- export the document as a web page. Go to File > Save As and select Web Page (.html).  This will create an .html file of your Word doc and create a subfolder with images included in the document.  Voila- you have access to (almost) full resolution images that were pasted into Word.  I'm going to use this trick all the time!

Hope it saves you some frustration.  Cheers,

-Kevin Wentworth