Find Pictures in a Word Document programmatically

Question

Problem:-

During a recent rebranding exercise at work, all the word documents (saved as RTF files))

I have word documents that are 2, 3 or even 4MB in size.

Looking at the pictures in the documents I noticed that some are scaled down to 48%, 70%, 88%, whatever. If I cut the image out of the document, paste it into Paint.NET, resize it, paste it back into the document and position it as per the original, I can get the size of the documents down to less than 1/10th of the manually fudged one.

I want to programmatically process 1150 Word documents and find pictures in there that are scaled. I then want to pull the pictures out, resize them, and then put them back in replacing the manually added pictures. Saving disk space.

I am having difficulty navigating the Word Object model and finding pictures programmatically.

This web page on MSDN says you can add them, like this

this.Application.Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture(@"C:\SamplePicture.jpg");

so I thought using the InlineShapes collection might give me access to the collection of pictures in the document.

I have interop declared.

using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop;
using Microsoft.Office;

and I open the Word application, and document like this (this works)

private void OpenWordApplication()
{
    _WordApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
    if (chkVisibleWord.CheckState == CheckState.Checked) {
        _WordApp.Visible = true;
    }
    else
    {
        _WordApp.Visible = false;
    }

}

private void OpenTheDocument(string DocumentPath)
{
    _WordDoc = _WordApp.Documents.Open(DocumentPath);
    changesMade = false;
}

When I try to find eh Pictures in the InlineShapes, I can't seem to get hold of them.

_WordApp.Selection.HomeKey(WdUnits.wdStory);

int picCount = _WordApp.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes.Count;
MessageBox.Show(string.Format("There are {0} images in this document", picCount));

I get a message box saying the count is zero.

NOTE: The application opens the documents in Word just fine. It does other things to the documents depending on what checkboxes I have checked on the form, the issue to me seems to be right down at accessing the InlineShapes collection.

Any pointers. I appreciate your attention so far?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The solution we did in the end was to get a tester, who was competent with Microsoft Word, a piece of paper, a pencil and the Paint.Net application.

The tester used the pencil and paper to mark down the dimensions and position of the image, and Paint.Net to resize the image.

I know it wasn't processing the documents / images programmatically, as I first intended, but we had a deadline to get the process completed, and sometimes as a developer you have to make a call when you think that doing things manually is the correct thing to do.

Answer 2

Try:

foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Shape s in wordApp.ActiveDocument.Shapes)
{
        ...
}

Answer 3

This code will find all the inline pictures in a document. These are indeed inline shapes. So not sure what the issue with the OP's code is.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

namespace OfficeBench
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Application app = new Application();
            Document doc = app.Documents.Open(@"c:\scratch\so\4pictures.docx");
            if (doc != null)
            {
                Console.WriteLine($"Number in in-line shapes = {doc.InlineShapes.Count}");
                foreach (InlineShape shape in doc.InlineShapes)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine($"Shape (width,height) = ({shape.Width},{shape.Height})");
                    Console.WriteLine($"Shape type = {shape.Type}");
                    Console.WriteLine();
                    if (shape.Type == WdInlineShapeType.wdInlineShapePicture)
                    {
                        // ...
                    }
                }
                doc.Close();
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error - Unable to open document.");
            }
        }
    }
}

This produces the output...

Number in in-line shapes = 4
Shape (width,height) = (293.25,164.75)
Shape type = wdInlineShapePicture

Shape (width,height) = (412.5,231.75)
Shape type = wdInlineShapePicture

Shape (width,height) = (226.9,127.5)
Shape type = wdInlineShapePicture

Shape (width,height) = (222.75,125.1)
Shape type = wdInlineShapePicture