PowerPoint Photo Album
- Open PowerPoint 2002 or higher.
- Choose Insert/Picture/New Photo Album…
- The resultant Photo Album dialog box
(see screenshot) provides many options. We'll walk through most of them in
this demonstration.
- Click the File/Disk… button on the
top left to open the Insert New Pictures dialog box. Navigate to
the folder where you have stored your pictures. Select them all using
either Shift or Ctrl clicking and click the Insert
button.
- Back in Photo Album, you can reorder the
sequence of your pictures using the up and down arrow keys below the
listing of the pictures. Each picture is previewed when selected, so you
can actually even remove pictures you don't need.
- While a picture is previewed, you have
options to rotate the pictures in 90 degree increments. In addition, you
can also alter the contrast and brightness values of a picture. All these
options are located directly below the picture preview window.
- Next, you can choose a picture layout.
Generally speaking, you have layouts for one, two and four pictures per
slide. Let's choose the 4 pictures layout.
- The frame shape option allows you to
provide specific corner styles to each picture. Choices include rectangle,
rounded rectangle, beveled, oval, corner tabs and square tabs. Let's
choose the beveled option.
- Finally, you are provided with an option to
choose your own design template. Click the Browse button. This
opens the Choose Design Template box that allows you to navigate to
the folder where we have stored the downloaded templates. Choose any of
the three templates.
- Finally, press the Create button.
You're done!
There are more features
in the Photo Album dialog box that we did not explore above. Let's discuss them
now:
- The Captions below ALL pictures options
allows you to provide a separate caption under each picture.
- The ALL pictures black and white
option converts all your pictures to grayscale color mode.
- You can also opt to include a separate text
box on each slide using the New Text Box option.
All these options can be
added even after your Photo Album is created—just choose Format/Photo Album when
your Photo Album presentation is open in PowerPoint.
You just ended up with a
basic Photo Album. You might want to refine the output by adding your own
transitions and custom animations. You might even want to add a continuous
music score to your entire presentation. (That's something we'll look at in the
next issue of TechTrax)
There's more to the
Photo Album thing yet - if you started with high resolution images, you'll find
your Photo Album presentation saves to a huge size. Something that is
impractical if you want to email it to others. To get around this problem,
follow these steps:
- Right-click any picture (actually an
AutoShape with a picture fill) and choose Format/AutoShape.
- Choose the Picture tab in the
resultant tabbed dialog box and click the Compress button.
- Change the resolution to Web/Screen and
choose to apply to all pictures in the document (presentation). Click OK
and then Apply to the next dialog box. Click OK again.
- Resave the presentation.