Photos in Presentations

Who doesn’t like to use photos in their presentation slides? But did you know that using photos in presentations is a two-edged sword that can help you conquer the minds of others, but can also hurt you in the process?

How can you be hurt? Well, people don’t realize that:

1. Photos can be copyrighted. If you don’t follow the rules of the game, you can be in big trouble. Sometimes, you may believe that a photo you are using is copyright free, but that may be not true, as you can read in our Picture Copyrights: An Iceberg Study post.
2. Explore clicking pictures for presentations. Did you know that your camera phone can click better pictures than the 20-year old professional camera that cost you an arm and a leg. But that doesn’t mean that the photos you click are always suitable.
3. Photos need relevance. Don’t just use photos because everyone else is using them!
4. Photos need coordination. If you use more than one photo on a slide, they need to be related, and they also need to have the same photo values.

Where To Get Photos?

There are so many resources to get photos:

1. You can license photos from some amazing sites such as iStock, BigStock, Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, etc.
2. Among the best deals ever is a StockUnlimited subscription that gets you over 800,000 visuals. They have very affordable yearly and three-year subscription plans.
3. You can look at free photo sources such as Pixabay or Unsplash.
4. Flickr has a mind-boggling number of pictures available—make sure you choose pictures that with the Creative Commons license.

How To Add Photos

Getting photos is only half the fun because you need to add photos now to your presentations. Here are some thoughts:

1. In PowerPoint, you can choose whether you want to insert or link photos. Inserting translates to placing a permanent copy of the photo in the slide. Linking means you are only adding a reference to a photo saved elsewhere on your computer. Most users choose to insert photos, and that’s also PowerPoint’s default behavior. Prezi, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides all allow you to insert photos in the same way.
2. PowerPoint has the amazing Photo Album option that lets you quickly import folders full of photos in two or three clicks. If you need to go further, there are third party add-ins for PowerPoint such as the Image Importer Wizard.

Triple-C Guidelines for Using Photos in Presentations

There are some guidelines that will help you use photos more effectively in your presentations, and here are the three top ones that we call the Triple-C. Why? Because all these three guidelines have words that start with C:

1. Crop your photos. Always make sure that the most important part of your photo is visible. Crop out the unnecessary areas.
2. Clichés can be terrible. You don’t want to use the same photos of handshakes, light bulbs, and globes. Think beyond the expected.
3. Captions can be necessary. Yes, a picture can be worth a thousand words, but it still may need some words to make it relevant.