"Export to Word" - how to keep image captions?

[paul.moloney]

Is there any way to preserve image captions from Confluence when exported to Word (without having to buy an addon?)

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[Fabio Racobaldo _Catworkx_]

Hi @paul.moloney ,

unfortunately confluence does not natively preserve image captions when exporting to Word. You should buy an external app for that (like Scroll Word Exporter).

Fabio 

[Jason U]

Hi Paul,

Unfortunately, the native “Export to Word” feature in Confluence Cloud does not preserve image captions — captions are treated as styled text below the image (not bound metadata), and Word exports them as plain paragraphs without a direct link to the image itself.

That’s why after export, captions appear either as separate lines or get lost depending on how they were added.

🧩 Workarounds you can try

1. Use image + paragraph combination
   Instead of the “caption” macro or inline caption, write the caption as a normal paragraph below the image (without any specific macro). Word will treat it as part of the document flow and preserve it.
2. Apply the “Image Caption” style manually in Word
   After export, you can quickly reformat captions using Find and Replace → Styles → Image Caption, if you maintain a consistent prefix like “Figure:”.
3. (Optional) If you need a fully automated export with linked captions, you’d need an app like:
   • Scroll Word Exporter by K15t
   • Advanced Export for Confluence by Xporter
     These allow caption preservation and image-reference linking — but yes, they’re paid add-ons.

⚠️ Why this happens

The default exporter only serializes XHTML page content without referencing CSS styling from macros.
Captions (even when using the “Image Caption” macro) are not part of the <figure> element, so they’re dropped during XML → DOCX conversion.