Thank you Charles Kenyon!
Inserting a linked image worked.. the resulting .htm file has the name of the original file in the IMG SRC command, rather than what it was before, which was the name of the new copy of the image created by Word: img00001

No macro for batch processing was necessary, I just clicked on "insert picture" then highligthed all 3000 files in the folder, and instead of clicking 'Insert' I clicked the arrow next to 'insert' and clicked "link to file" .... all 3000 pictures then appeared on my word document and the resulting .htm file referenced the pictures by their original names for all 3000 pictures.

Thank you for telling me what it was that I needed to look up how to do (inserting linked files). Having now seen more capabilities of Word.. I have to say it's almost as good as LaTeX !

Thanks again