Delete Pictures in Microsoft Word

I was sleepwalking while deleting pictures one-by-one in a document — not remembering there was a faster and easier way to do this. First, I tried copying and pasting the image in the find/replace tool, but no luck. I knew there was a way to do it as I recalled discovering this process a long time ago.
After searching — surprisingly longer than I expected — I found the answer. Too simple.

  1. Do Find and Replace (CTRL+H) in Microsoft Word.
  2. Enter ^g in the “Find what” box.
  3. Enter whatever you want to replace with in the “Replace with” box or leave blank to simply delete all the images.
  4. Click “Replace All.”

Deleting floating graphics requires a macro. This solution also comes from the Google Groups post.

26 thoughts on “Delete Pictures in Microsoft Word”

  1. It is funny how simple it is to do this. The sad part is that there are actually software out there that CHARGE to delete all images from an MS Document. It’s no wonder people pirate when there are so many programs made to rip people off when solutions are even easier. Thanks for the awesome tip!

  2. wow, I can’t believe how easy this is and how difficult to find out about it has been. Thank you so much you’ve saved me a lot of time.

  3. Glad y’all found your answers here. It made it extra worth it to spend the time pulling my hair out to find an easier solution. Happy deleting! 🙂

  4. Thank you very much. I was about to fall asleep deleting the background image from every page, now I can get back to work!

  5. Thank you very much. I actually felt silly after doing it, I mean it’s so simply and I had such a hard time before I read this post….

  6. I got tables inside this Word doc and the cells have images that I cannot delete! It’s as if they were backgrounds. Your trick didn’t work.

  7. Thank you for the tip! You saved me probably a week’s worth of deleting images…. was working on a document with over 800 pages with several image on each page and I was getting really really frustrated!
    THANK YOU!!!

  8. I don’t know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering
    problems with your site. It appears like some of the written text within
    your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide
    feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too?
    This might be a issue with my web browser because I’ve had this happen before.
    Cheers

Comments are closed.