Inserting scanned pictures into word files

[Rosie173]

Can anyone suggest what I must do to get good quality images that are not enormous, from scanned photos which are jpegs, into my word files?

I am trying to put 450 A4 pages of a family history into MS Word on computer. The text is already in MS word but there are hundreds of full sized photos often 4 overlapping per page which i am scanning in and placing among the text. The work has been done by someone else who is not familiar with digital images.
So far the book has been printed from hard copies of printed sheets and the photos are just glued on pages which makes it hard to print and difficult to update and change the book.

After much ado I have divided the text into blocks of 24 pages per file and am inserting the pictures this way so that each file doesn't get too big but what is driving me absolutely crazy is understanding how the images work when they are placed in word

I can copy part of a picture of 618kb, paste it into the word file and the word file size will go up by 4 megabytes.

I have tried reducing the original picture file by using grayscale, altering the size of the picture in photoshop, altering the resolution but it is all hit and miss and I am not sure what is really happening. I want reasonably good reproduction in the document but I just don't have the skills to cope with all this. Please, please help.

[macropod]

Hi Rosie,

When you say you're copying part of an image, are you saving that part to disk as an image in its own right and then importing it into Word? If not, what might be happening is that the whole image is being inserted in a cropped format.

If you insert the pictures as links, the document's file size will be much less affected than if you embed the pictures in the document. The downside is that the links may need to be updated if the picture location changes.

For end-users, you may find it best to convert the document to PDF before distribution. That way, you can be sure that the page layout rmains consistent for all users. Moreover, PDFs with images are often significantly smaller than the Word files from which they're generated.

[Rosie173]

Thanks for your reply Paul. I have scanned in whole A4 pages as jpegs and in Preview am then copying the parts of the page with the images I need and pasting them into the word pages. I am not saving them as separate images because this can cause other problems with the file sizes that I don't understand . To be honest I am not sure how it works because I really don't understand what happens when you crop images or just copy parts. I thought that copying the part of the page I wanted might take up less room than cropping pages and saving them. But every time you copy a picture file in photoshop or preview you have to re save it in a lesser quality file or it gets bigger. And I don't understand how cropping works-is the rest of the page still there? Obviously I need to read up some more on all these things but I can never seem to find anything that quite addresses the issues.

I am not sure how to insert a picture as a link rather embedding the picture but how can I be sure how it will look and be placed if I can't see it on the page?

I tried saving some pages as pdfs but they seemed to be as big as the word pages.
Many thanks for any help-I feel very stupid but am beyond embarrassment. I was going to use a desk top publishing program at which I am fairly proficient but my son assured me that word can do it all as well and is more accessible to everyone for changing and adding information!

[macropod]

Hi Rosie,

Whenever you edit a file in the jpg format, image quality degrades upon saving. Whether that degradation becomes noticeable depends on a number of factors we don't need to discuss here. What matters is whether the final image meets your needs.

In Word, you can insert an image an crop it there. The cropping options allow you to retain or discard the cropped portions. You also have the option of having Word compress the image upon saving. IIRC, that's Word's default setting. Many users find that letting Word compress the images has deleterious effects on the image quality, so it's not something I'd recommend.

When you insert an image by capturing it from another program, all you're likely to get is someting at your current screen resolution. So, unless you're going to scale the imagedown quite a bit in Word, you're likely to find the printed image's quality will be poor. And, invariably, Word has to use it's own algorithms for decising how much compression etc to apply. The lower the compression, the greater the disk space (and better quality) the image will probably require.

Unless you're pressed for disk space, I wouldn't be too concerned about the file size. To insert an image as a link, the process in Word 2007 (PC) is Insert|Picture > Select the picture, then choose the 'Link to File' option from the 'Insert' dropdown. I assume Word 2011 (Mac) will be much the same.

I feel very stupid but am beyond embarrassment

LOL - we've all been there.

[Rosie173]

Thankyou for your advice. I just looked up how to discard the cropped part of a picture in word and did it, but even when I chose 'keep the current resolution' in picture quality the file increased in size by about two and a half times. Why would it increase in size when a lot of the picture has been removed?

[macropod]

Hi Rosie,

I imagine the file size would have increased even more if you hadn't cropped the picture. Why the size increase doesn't directly correspond with the size of the original images on disk has to do with the way Word stores them - including whatever compression quality it aims for. If it's aiming for a higher quality than the original (to minimise compression artefacts), that might explain the increase.

[OfficeBuddy102]

Hi Rosie,

Do you have access to Photoshop or a similar program. You can make the jpegs smaller and still retain the quality by going under Image and then Image size and change the width or height under document size. If you don't have Photoshop, maybe someone can recommend a free software that you can download and accomplish the same.

[macropod]

Hi OfficeBuddy,

That really doesn't address what happens when you insert the picture into Word, which uses its own algortihms for storing the data. Yes, changing the height/width can help, but the problem we're dealing with here has nothing to do with Photoshop's interpretation of a 'document size'. What matters is the actual number of pixels for a given width/height as the image will appear in the Word document. Around 300ppi for the final image size in Word is about the minimum needed for photo-quality and anything over 400ppi is wasted and merely increases the filesize.

None of which explains why the Word file size increases disproportionately when an image in inserted.

[OfficeBuddy102]

Hi MacroBuddy,
It is relevant to discuss using Photoshop or some other program to adjust the size of a picture. Photoshop also changes the pixel size when you make adjustments to width or height of the photo. Photoshop will also show you what the show you what the resolution of the original photo.

[macropod]

Hi OfficeBuddy,

Without placing too fine a point on it, no graphics app changes the pixel size. That's complete nonsense. All any app does is determine how far apart pixels will be printed/displayed. The 'dpi' figure reported by many apps is meaningless, since the actual 'dpi' figure is entirely dependent on the chosen print size. You can change that and the 'dpi' figure reported by many graphics apps will stubbornly remain unchanged. That's because it's completely irrelevant.

And yes, I have Photoshop (and other graphics apps as well).

What you also need to keep sight of is that every edit to a jpg picture degrades the saved image.