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BATCH IMPORT images into PowerPoint


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Shape Styles brings the power of styles to PowerPoint. Apply complex formatting with a single click
Merge Excel, CSV or tab-delimited data into PowerPoint presentations to create certificates, awards presentations, personalized presentations and more
FixLinks prevents broken links when you distribute PowerPoint presentations
Optimizer saves disk space and bandwidth, shrinks your PowerPoint presentations to the right size for email, screenshow or printing
PPT2HTML gives you full control of PowerPoint HTML output, helps meet Section 508 accessibility requirements
Prep4PDF preserves interactivity in PowerPoint presentations when you convert to PDF
Image Export converts PowerPoint slides to JPG, PNG, GIF, WMF and and more

How can I batch import lots of pictures into PowerPoint?
If you have PowerPoint XP (2002) or higher you can choose Insert, Picture, From File and select multiple picture files. When you click OK, they'll all be inserted at one time onto the current slide.

But more likely you want one picture per slide. And it'd be nice if PowerPoint would insert new slides, one per image, right? Right. So read on ...

Free PowerPoint PhotoAlbums

If you have PowerPoint 2002 or 2003, you can choose Insert, Picture, New Photo Album. If you have PowerPoint 2000, use the free Microsoft Photo Album add-in for PowerPoint 2000. But before using Photo Albums, read this.

Other options

MVP Shyam Pillai has written an incredibly useful, full-featured Image Importer Wizard that lets you do virtually any sort of batch image import you might want. And if it doesn't, he's probably added the feature since I wrote this, so now it does.

Pixerter is a relative newcomer with some interesting features.

Are you a Mac user? Macintosh Office MVP Jim Gordon has excellent batch picture importers:

If you're of the tinkering persuasion, you can build your own importer. This will get you started:
Batch Insert a folder full of pictures, one per slide

What's wrong with PhotoAlbum?

The PhotoAlbum feature in PowerPoint 2002/2003 (and the PhotoAlbum add-in for PowerPoint 2000) are free and offer a few features that the other suggestions above don't. But they also have a few drawbacks you should be aware of:

They don't import pictures. Instead, they create rectangles or other shapes, then fill them with pictures. This can cause other problems later (picture links break, you can't crop the pictures and PowerPoint can't compress the pictures the way it can with pictures inserted from file.).

If you use PhotoAlbum, at the very least, be sure to insert the images rather than linking to them. The links it creates will almost surely break if you move the presentation, and they're not repairable the way regular links to inserted picture files are.

On the bright side, if you apply animation effects to the inserted pictures then decide to use a different picture, you only have to right-click, choose Format, and choose another picture for the picture fill. The animations won't be lost.

So long as you don't link the photos and don't need to crop or compress them, you're good to go. If you later need to compress images inserted this way, there's a macro here that'll help:

Why are my PowerPoint files so big? What can I do about it?
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00062.htm


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BATCH IMPORT images into PowerPoint
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00050.htm
Last update 03 October, 2007