Google Docs is a great collaboration tool to work on documents. You can invite your team members and give them permission to edit the document. In Google Docs, collaboration happens in real-time.
A problem comes if you need to turn a document in Google Docs to another format, say blog post. Especially if the document contains images since Google Docs has no feature to directly download images from a document. Is there a solution?
There are at least two ways to extract images from a document in Google Docs.
1. Publish the document to the web
Google Docs allows you to publish a document to the web. When you publish a document to the web, the document will be converted into an HTML format. Nearly all web browsers allow you to download images from an HTML document by right-clicking each image. You can make use of this feature to extract images from your document in Google Docs.
To publish a document the web, go to the File menu and select Publish to the web.
Click the Publish button under the Link tab.
You will see a confirmation popup dialog after clicking the Publish button. Simply click OK.
Copy the generated link and paste it to the address bar of your browser.
To download the images, simply right-click the image you want to download and select Save image as.
Once done downloading the images, you can unpublish your document to prevent something bad from happening. To do so, switch back to your document in Google Docs. Go to the File menu and select Publish to the web. Click the Stop publishing button under Published content & settings. Uncheck the Automatically republish when changes are made option to prevent your document to be published when you or your team members made new changes.
2. Download your document as a web page
Google Docs allows you to download a document into a wide range of formats, including a web page. When you download a document into a web page, Google Docs will download the document in a ZIP file. The ZIP file contains the HTML format of your document as well as a folder to save the images associated with the document. This method is better-suited if the document you want to extract the images from contains too many images. You don’t need to download the images individually one by one.
To download a document as a web page, go to the File menu and select Download -> Web Page.
Wait a moment until your browser is done downloading the ZIP file. Once done, find the file under the download location of your browser (Downloads folder in most cases). Unzip the ZIP file with your favorite unzipper. The unzipping process will generate an HTML file and an images folder. You can find your images under the images folder.
