We have a few documents that had a large number of images, which makes these
documents very large.
This, of course makes it harder to email or even ftp these documents.

When the documents were inserted they were either JPEG or BMP files.

I am wondering:
a: How they are stored in the document, and
b: if there is any way to extract the originals so that we could manipulate
them, such as turning them into .gif or some other more compact file format.

My end goal is to reduce the total size of the documents, but I do not just
want to insert shrunken images.

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.  URLs to articles, direct advice,
etc.

.... Is there anyway to write a macro to extract the images?