Paul Smith's PowerPoint Pages
Inserting Pictures in PowerPoint Presentation

As a convenient guide to sizing photographs for PowerPoint, assume that the set up for an on screen show gives a page size of 10"x7.5" at 100dpi. Photographs scanned at this size will fill the screen. It is very rarely necessary to scan pictures at a higher resolution. It's not uncommon see PowerPoint files which contain only a few pictures, but are over 50Mb in size. To keep files sizes reasonable, don't save pictures as bitmaps (bmp) or Tiff, always save as jpeg, using  medium compression/image quality.

Scan your photographs at an appropriate size, as described above. If the pictures are black and white, make sure they are saved as greyscale to keep file sizes small. If you are scanning pictures from books or magazines, use the "descreen" option to remove the dot patterns from the published picture. Inserting a sheet of black paper between pages helps prevent text showing through from other pages. If you have photos supplied to you from other sources, check the image/file size is not too large, and reduce the size if necessary. (If you do not already have image editing software, "Adobe Photoshop Elements" is excellent. )
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From the PowerPoint Ribbon on the insert tab, click "Picture", and from the window that appears,  browse to the folder where you have saved your picture, select it and click on "insert". The picture will now appear in your slide.
  • A sample image at 10.5"x7.5", 100dpi saved as a jpeg has a file size of 136Kb. The same picture saved as a bitmap is 2.2Mb
  • If you only have one photo in a slide, use all the available space.
  • If you have more than one photo in a slide, use a dark blue or black background, (white backgrounds tend to glare, and distract from the pictures)
  • To view example, click here. (PowerPoint 2007 file)
  • You may be able to reduce the file size of existing presentations.
     Click here for details

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