Imagine you’re working with a lengthy Google Document, or a Google Slides presentation, and you need to extract all the embedded images from the text and save them as individual files.

Extract Individual Images

A simple solution to address this issue is as follows: convert your Google Document or Google Slide into a web page. Here’s how you can do it:

Go to the “File” menu. Select the “Share” submenu and then choose “Publish to Web.” It will generate a public web page that contains all the images from your document or slide. You can simply right-click an image on the page and select the “Save Image” option download it to your local disk.

What we have just discussed is a manual process but we can easily automate this with the help of Google Apps Script.

Extract all Images from a Google Document

Open your Google Document containing the images, go to the Extensions menu and choose Apps Script. Copy-paste the code below and run the saveGoogleDocsImages function to download all images to a specific folder in your Google Drive.

The images are sequentially numbered and the file extension is the same as that of the embedded inline image.

function saveGoogleDocsImages() {
  // Define the folder name where the extracted images will be saved
  const folderName = 'Document Images';

  // Check if a folder with the specified name already exists
  const folders = DriveApp.getFoldersByName(folderName);

  // If the folder exists, use it; otherwise, create a new folder
  const folder = folders.hasNext() ? folders.next() : DriveApp.createFolder(folderName);

  // Get all the images in the document's body and loop through each image
  DocumentApp.getActiveDocument()
    .getBody()
    .getImages()
    .forEach((image, index) => {
      // Get the image data as a Blob
      const blob = image.getBlob();

      // Extract the file extension from the Blob's content type (e.g., 'jpeg', 'png')
      const [, fileExtension] = blob.getContentType().split('/');

      // Generate a unique file name for each image based on its position in the document
      const fileName = `Image #${index + 1}.${fileExtension}`;

      // Set the Blob's name to the generated file name
      blob.setName(fileName);

      // Create a new file in the specified folder with the image data
      folder.createFile(blob);

      // Log a message indicating that the image has been saved
      Logger.log(`Saved ${fileName}`);
    });
}

Extract all Images from Google Slides

The Apps Script code to download images from a Google Slides presentation is similar. The function iterates over the slides in the presentation and then for each slide, the function iterates over the images in that slide.

function extractImagesFromSlides() {
  // Define the folder name where the extracted images will be saved
  const folderName = 'Presentation Images';

  // Check if a folder with the specified name already exists
  const folders = DriveApp.getFoldersByName(folderName);

  // If the folder exists, use it; otherwise, create a new folder
  const folder = folders.hasNext() ? folders.next() : DriveApp.createFolder(folderName);

  // Iterate through each slide in the active presentation
  SlidesApp.getActivePresentation()
    .getSlides()
    .forEach((slide, slideNumber) => {
      // Retrieve all images on the current slide
      slide.getImages().forEach((image, index) => {
        // Get the image data as a Blob
        const blob = image.getBlob();

        // Extract the file extension from the Blob's content type (e.g., 'jpeg', 'png')
        const fileExtension = blob.getContentType().split('/')[1];

        const fileName = `Slide${slideNumber + 1}_Image${index + 1}.${fileExtension}`;

        // Set the Blob's name to the generated file name
        blob.setName(fileName);

        // Create a new file in the specified folder with the image data
        folder.createFile(blob);

        Logger.log(`Saved ${fileName}`);
      });
    });
}