Remove all images from docx files

Question

I've searched the documentation for python-docx and other packages, as well as stack-overflow, but could not find how to remove all images from docx files with python.

My exact use-case: I need to convert hundreds of word documents to "draft" format to be viewed by clients. Those drafts should be identical the original documents but all the images must be deleted / redacted from them.

Sorry for not including an example of things I tried, what I have tried is hours of research that didn't give any info. I found this question on how to extract images from word files, but that doesn't delete them from the actual document: Extract pictures from Word and Excel with Python

From there and other sources I've found out that docx files could be read as simple zip files, I don't know if that means that it's possible to "re-zip" without the images without affecting the integrity of the docx file (edit: simply deleting the images works, but prevents python-docx from continuing to work with this file because of missing references to images), but thought this might be a path to a solution.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If your goal is to redact images maybe this code I used for a similar usecase could be useful:

import sys
import zipfile
from PIL import Image, ImageFilter
import io

blur = ImageFilter.GaussianBlur(40)

def redact_images(filename):
    outfile = filename.replace(".docx", "_redacted.docx")
    with zipfile.ZipFile(filename) as inzip:
        with zipfile.ZipFile(outfile, "w") as outzip:
            for info in inzip.infolist():
                name = info.filename
                print(info)
                content = inzip.read(info)
                if name.endswith((".png", ".jpeg", ".gif")):
                        fmt = name.split(".")[-1]
                        img = Image.open(io.BytesIO(content))
                        img = img.convert().filter(blur)
                        outb = io.BytesIO()
                        img.save(outb, fmt)
                        content = outb.getvalue()
                        info.file_size = len(content)
                        info.CRC = zipfile.crc32(content)
                outzip.writestr(info, content)

Here I used PIL to blur images in some files, but instead of the blur filter any other suitable operation could be used. This worked quite nicely for my usecase.