Adding Photographs to Your PowerPoint Presentations

Let’s face it, it’s far more interesting sitting through a PowerPoint presentation with beautiful imagery, rather than all words. With all the great stuff available on Google images, many people feel like it’s a “piece of cake” to pull pictures off the internet. Well, there are a few problems with that. First off, many of the nicer photographs are protected by copyright, so if you’re preparing something for your company, you really shouldn’t use these. Also, what you get when you do a general image search online is a real hodgepodge. And since your presentation should hold together well as a unit, the photographs you use should look related, or in the same “family.” This is why a company called iStock photo can be a great resource. When you’re on the site, you can search for photographs all taken by the same photographer who may work in a certain genre, i.e. contemporary and edgy. Or you can just search by style, for example, multiple photos of individual vegetables, all taken in soft focus. The fact that most of these shots are reasonably priced and royalty free is just icing on the cake. So the next time you’re preparing a PowerPoint presentation, think about taking this more organized approach to finding high quality images that not only relate to one another, but are also perfectly legal to use and reuse.