Problem

This article is based upon a question asked by Chandra.

This is a common requirement.

I have multiple pictures and I want to show one picture per slide.

These could be a series of screenshots or views of a new house on sale or construction steps or manufacturing / assembling process…

Needless to say, most of us take the laborious and inefficient path of adding one slide and inserting a picture repeatedly.

As always, there is a better way. The sad part is that this method is available for at least 15 years!

Solution

Make sure all the required pictures are in the same folder – it makes this easier to select them.

1. Start PowerPoint – DO NOT EVEN CREATE A PRESENTATION
2. Make sure NO Presentation is open
3. Now almost all options are inactive because there is nothing to edit. Don’t worry.
4. Choose Insert tab and check which option is still active : Photo Album
5. Click File /Disk and select photos (remember you could have connected a Camera or an SD card which appears as a drive – that is why the word DISK is shown here)
6. Click Insert
7. By default it creates one slide per picture and resizes the picture to fit the slide
8. Click Create button

That’s it. The presentation is ready.

One more step required. Compress Pictures

Usually picture centric presentations tend to be too heavy on size. So here is how you minimize the size. First, save the original slide show. Click on any picture – in Picture Tools – choose Compress Pictures button.

Remove the checkbox from Apply only to this picture, choose 96 ppi resolution and Compress.

This way ALL the pictures are compressed in one go.

Now save the presentation as a copy and compare the file sizes. If the photos are already compressed then you may not achieve significant size reduction.

What more can you do?

Remember that the Photo Album has a dropdown which shows another option – Edit Photo Album.

So if you feel like changing anything from the album, don’t discard the current one and create a new one. Just go to edit, change the desired option and choose Update.

1. Decide how many pictures per slide
2. Choose if you want the filename to be displayed
3. Decide if you want to have a title for each slide
4. Choose a specific theme
5. Choose Frame Shape
6. Do some quick photo editing like rotation, brightness, contract
7. Reorder the pictures
8. Decide if you want pictures to be black and white

Generic Learning

Look at the Photo Album button. This is a composite button. It has upper part which does the action – creates photo album and lower part which shows a dropdown and more options. Notice such buttons.

For example the New Slide button is like this. Paste button is another common example. Start noticing the dropdowns and explore. In short:

Drop the Dropdowns and learn more