Export all images from a Word (.doc) document ... and rename them

During the summer I was handed a delicate 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 like:

Since Kanban In Action now have 13 chapters in different .doc-files I immediately realized two things:

• Marcus - your are stupid for not tracking these images somewhere
• This is to big to do manually

This post describes how I did. It took me about 2 hours all together.

Export all files in a Word document

The chapters are written in .doc formats (for some reason), but I seem to recall that the newer format .docx in reality is just a zip-file. Maybe, just maybe, that could help me. 

1. I "Save as..."'ed the file to .docx.
2. Then I renamed the file to .zip and extracted the archive to a folder. 
3. Low 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 task up next:

Renaming a lot of files (on OSX)

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!

300 pictures is way more than I care to rename by hand. Remember that they wanted each file to be named [chapter number]_[sequence number in chapter].png. I then found this awesome video that shows how to do that with Automator. 

Here are the steps I ended up using:

1. Start Automator
2. Choose New->Application
3. Search for "Rename Finder Items" and click OK
4. Select "Don't add" in the dialog that ask you if you want to create copies of the file. I didn't since I wanted to rename them
5. In the drop down select "Replace text" and do your replacement settings. Here are my example:
   
   
6. Save the application to a wellknown 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 ranamed.