Word – How to properly work with images in Word

I'm currently writing a larger document in Word again and images (especially with captions) pose a few problems.

So far I have enumerated the following options and drawbacks:

1. Insert images in their own line. The caption then is a paragraph above or below the image. This works fine, has no problems with image placement or disappearing images, as the image is just a token within the text and not floating. The problem is that I can insert images only between paragraphs with this method which sometimes has ugly results around page breaks (when the image doesn't fit on a previous page and shifts to the next, leaving a potentially large space at the end of a page).

2. Insert images as floating elements, tying them to the page (e.g. top or bottom). This allows paragraphs to break around images if needed, potentially solving the space problem at the end of pages. However, image captions are inserted as a text field with absolute positioning on the page and don't shift when the image is moved e.g. from the top to the bottom of the page. Furthermore, the text field is the same width as the image by default which makes it difficult to provide captions for narrower images.

3. Insert images and captions into a text field as inline items and then float the text field. This solves the problems with the caption as separate text field but still has one problem (which may apply to the previous one as well): Floating items are anchored to a paragraph and Word makes sure to retain both the floated item and the anchored paragraph on the same page, which again introduces page break problems in some cases. So I still have to go through the complete document at the end and move around the anchors so text flows like it should.

Maybe I'm doing everything wrong here, but hopefully not. Is there maybe another option that just works?

Side note: This is a Word question. I'm fully aware that I can convert the few dozen pages I have by now into LaTeX which likely introduces a whole host of different problems I need to solve, then. It is an option, but not one you need to give me here, thanks.