Batch Extract Image Files from PowerPoint Presentations

After going through a lot of grief with alternate (and unsuccessful) methods to do this task, I ran across this incredibly simple solution for extracting image files from within PowerPoint presentations. (I'm repurposing decades-old PowerPoint presentations with hundreds of images on hundreds of pages, so hand-extracting the content image-by-image, page-by-page is tedious and even physically painful.)

The only minimum requirement is that the PowerPoint files be in .pptx file format (not just .ppt), or access to a version of PowerPoint from Office 2007 or later, which can write .pptx files.

This example is on a Mac, but the same principle works on Windows, all that is required for Windows is an un-ZIP utility.

The solution is SIMPLE. SIMPLE.

• If the PowerPoint file has a .ppt extension, open it in PowerPoint 2007+ and save it again as .pptx.
• PPTX files save presentation data as widely-supported XML data structures, compressed in a package using the venerable ZIP archive format.
• On a Mac, rename the .pptx extension to .zip. The Finder will ask if you’re sure. Click “Use .zip.”
• Double-click the resulting .zip file. The Finder will uncompress the file into a directory structure. Inside[folder with orig filename]:ppt:media are all the image files in their native formats.

SIMPLE!