Nigel Sadler - Digital Photography

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Use in PowerPoint

Important points to remember …

Do not use an image that is:

greater than 1-megapixels in resolution
over 1Mb in file size
larger than 1024 x 768 pixels

Optimise your image to be:

no larger than 1024 x 768 pixels in size
no greather than 100dpi
saved in .jpg file format at 'High Quality' setting

It is not desirable to insert your original digital image into a PowerPoint presentation. The original image is likely to be of far larger and of a higher resolution than is needed for an on-screen presentation. It is therefore necessary to make an optimise copy of your original image for use in a presentation.

There are a number of options and considerations to make here:

Image size (dimensions). If you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation, then a full screen image of around 1024 x 768 is more than sufficient. Go smaller if the image is to appear smaller on the screen.
When reducing the image size, it will need optically sharpening again, so use the sharpen filter in your image editing programme to do this.
When the changes are complete, save a copy of the image with a suitable name in JPEG (or JPG) format. This compresses the image into a small size and although it does reduce image quality, will be acceptable for on-screen or projected viewing.

This will result in an image which will convey all the basic information but with a small file size - seldom over 100kb. This is essential for keeping the file size of PowerPoint presentations manageable as each imported image adds to the overall file size. Unnecessarily big presentation file sizes will not make you popular with presentation engineers and your presentation may not behave as expected on other people's equipment! There is seldom a good reason why an individual's presentation should exceed five megabytes.

Updated:
24 May, 2006

anti-spam email: nigel at sadler dot net
Location: Forest Row, East Sussex, England